Guild Wars 2

A few weeks ago, I was in desperate need of gold, and didn’t want to do only farming. I decided to try and lookup on the internet how I could craft profitable items.

I stumbled upon good websites (like gw2spidy), which almost fulfilled my need, but the ability to make the distinction between the highest buying offer already existing and the lowest selling offer is lacking.

Therefore, I created http://www.gw2craftgold.com for this possibility: be able to choose whether I want to make some immediate profit (but obviously, with moderate returns), be more adventurous (I place a bid to receive the components with a price equals to the “highest buy order” existing, and place a bid to sell my recipe) or in between.

I have a lot of improvements and new features in mind, but if I could already get a feedback on how you like the idea, what you would like me to improve, and what new features would interest you, it would be awesome!

Thanks in advance!
Cheers

I would add a bit to show if a recipe needs an item to craft it or if it’s discoverable.
you can use the “flags” part of the recipe api, if it requires an item recipe, it would be “LearnedFromItem”.

Nice website! A very handy tool.

Mystic, your point is very valid, I think it totally makes sense to add this “need recipe” or “discoverable” information.
I’ll add that very soon.
Thanks both of your for your comments.

If I may say so…quite good work mate! thumbs up!

Unfortunately quite a lot of those need recipes such as the feasts while many others are very slow moving. Consider all of the people who will see this and try to make easy gold, and their tendency to flood the market while having undercutting wars with each other, I don’t see many of the larger profit margin items lasting much longer.

Which brings prices down and is good for the community as a whole..

GreenAlien.5623:

Which brings prices down and is good for the community as a whole..

That’s a bit debatable… and in my own opinion I would not say `as a whole` the community is helped. Low market prices help new players that have not had time to earn money, and extremely casual players who don’t have time to spend a couple hours every day farming or running dungeons. Other people (a majority, but again, only an opinion) suffer when the number of avenues they can use to get cash aside from dungeons is reduced.

@Ayrilana, I now added the details of whether you have to acquire the recipe or you can discover it (under Even more details)

Regarding the fear that this will reduce prices dramatically, I tend to disagree as there is only a very little number of users compared to the whole guild wars population so I don’t think the website will have such a big influence.

If I made this website, it was first for myself at the beginning (to have a bit of fun coding) but then I thought that it could help semi-casual players like me who are trying to make money with crafting. Prior to this, I really didn’t know what items to craft (there are so many!) so I just crafted to reach level 400 and never used that as a source of income.
Now, this is (again, I am speaking only for myself) a nice alternative way.

Nice website for sure.

Though I have serious doubts that some of these things actually sell at the listed prices. Especially some of the stuff on the maximum profit page. Like the Knight’s Ogre Crusher, which is insanely overpriced and anyone who just wants the skin for the collection could just buy any of the other stat combinations at a much better price.

But its just a resource, that’s not to imply its any problem with the site. It’ll still be up to the end user to decide how to use that info.

Sroced.9512:

@Ayrilana, I now added the details of whether you have to acquire the recipe or you can discover it (under Even more details)

Regarding the fear that this will reduce prices dramatically, I tend to disagree as there is only a very little number of users compared to the whole guild wars population so I don’t think the website will have such a big influence.

If I made this website, it was first for myself at the beginning (to have a bit of fun coding) but then I thought that it could help semi-casual players like me who are trying to make money with crafting. Prior to this, I really didn’t know what items to craft (there are so many!) so I just crafted to reach level 400 and never used that as a source of income.
Now, this is (again, I am speaking only for myself) a nice alternative way.

You underestimate how slow those markets can be and how quickly a small number of players can crash it.

It’s one of the main reasons that a lot of us don’t release stuff like this. Of course, the feasts and such will likely not be influenced much since there’s a decent sized cost to get the recipe and then additional time to recover the cost before you can start making profit. All of which depends on how quickly the feasts are sold and how many players choose to participate.

Edit:

I’ve personally watched several items that i was crafting for profit become unprofitable. Sometimes it happened over the course of a few weeks and other times in a matter of a few hours. It all depended on the velocity of sales for the item and how many people participated.

I’ve seen players try to sell 25+ of a slow moving item only to be undercut by someone else. They then slowly drive the price down eliminating profit. The more people that do this, the quicker that this happens.

I’ve also gotten annoyed at times to purposely crash the prices for some items to force everyone to dump what they have, and forget about it, to then later on move the price back out to making profit again. Sometimes that works and other times it doesn’t.

@Sroced: That is a good point. I have noticed that some of the items have very high sell points, but from experience I know that those items will NEVER sell at those prices. Some personal market experience will be needed to know which of those items will ACTUALLY make you profit, rather than just sitting for years on an item that may never move.

As someone who’s made a website similar to this, I can vouch that prices that are too good to be true frequently are, and you shouldn’t try to sell too many. That said, I still will make one or more and try to sell them prices rarely ‘crash’, they more of ‘slide’. if it costs 10s to make an item that currently sells for 1g, I might make 10 of them, then list 2. if those sell, I’ll list another 2. If I get undercut by 2 or more items, I’ll list 2 more 1c below them (leaving my first 2 there). the beauty: if I sell just 1 item, I recoup my entire costs, and the other 9 are pure profits. It rarely takes more than 3 relistings to sell everything.

It would be awesome if you could add a filter for text, “Rampager”, for example.

@Zaxares, you are right. As Electro said, this is just a ressource, you still have to use your best judgement to see if the item will possible get sold in the upcoming days / weeks.

@Cakemeister: I have planned to do a thing that I have not yet had time to do: it’s to be able to select an item (usable for crafting) and display all the recipes that use this item, in order to see which one would be the most interesting.
Would that be your usecase as well?
If it is, then I hope to do that at some point next week, maybe this weekend, depending on real life constraints.

@Mystic: I’m not very adventurous, so I very seldom place selling offers, I often prefer to place buying offer and then sell my items directly, but I guess you have a good point, I’ll try doing that in the future.

Anyway, thank you all for your feedbacks/comments (even criticism), it’s much appreciated. If you have any new features you would like to see, please let me know!

Specifically I was wanting to craft various “Ogre” weapons and searching for “Ogre” would determine which ones would be easy/cheap/profitable to craft.

I have added with what I think is a cool feature: now, on the recipe details page, you can see the live listings price, and you have a graph that tells you what is the optimum number of items to craft and make profit – being able to choose whether you want to place buy/sell offers or buy/sell directly.

@Cakemeister: Ok, I got your usecase. It doesn’t seem hard to implement, but I am a bit annoyed as there are already a lot of filter elements for a small screen.
So I’ll probably add a “Additional filters” where I would add filters through name, recipe level, and everything I can think of.
Thanks for the comment, much appreciated!

Are you planning to add other recipes too? I noticed that Bolt of Damask and Bowl of Vegetable Stock did not show up when they produce profit. The latter actually produces 100% profit (150% if you bought ingredients on buy order).

I have not added them because:
Bowl of Vegetable Stock needs Celery, which is an account bound item (meaning you can not buy them with the trading post)

Bolt of Damask needs “Spool of Silk Weaving Thread” which is account bound also – but this spool is craftable with normal items.
For items such as Bolt of Damask, I have yet to add this extra layer (ingredient of the recipe produced by crafting)

For recipes requiring items you cannot buy (karma items for example – like the celery example), I still have to define what would be the best way of handling them. Any suggestion?

Set the value as 0 or add a column for karma costs. When I do my calculations, I just set the cost to zero as it’s inconsequential. Karma is very easy to get and the costs are relatively low.

I brought up those items since quite a number of quick and easy gold by crafting recipes are of those types. For the celery, you can do the event daily and get enough karma to buy enough to make several stacks of vegetable stock.

Sroced.9512:

but I am a bit annoyed as there are already a lot of filter elements for a small screen.

welcome to my world. wanting to put everything someone might want but also make it useable.

I agree with you Mystic, there are so many information to display that it’s hard to have something with everything in it and readable.

I have added the karma recipes, so you can now search for items like “Bowl of Vegetable Stock” or other recipes involving karma. I have yet to define if I want to add some kind of equivalence (like 100 000 karma = 1 Gold)

Sroced.9512:

I have yet to define if I want to add some kind of equivalence (like 100 000 karma = 1 Gold)

I like to keep gold, karma, SP, tokens separate but still display them all. example:
Price to sell:
6s97c

Price to make:
2s20c
+29.4Karma

Profit:
3s72c (169%)
1g26s68c/1000Karma

That way you can compare it to other things that require karma, to see if you’re getting a good deal or not. it’s no longer just TP trading, but instead converting karma into gold.
‘tokens’ could be dungeon tokens, or other tokens you need to collect that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

I’m sure Mystic could help you with the karma conversion rates for gold. Let’s say that spending karma on karma armor to throw in mystic forge so you can salvage that yields 7s per 1k karma. You can prorate that to how much karma was used in the recipe.

I’m assuming that all light armor pieces have a predetermined number of scraps you can get from them (or at least an established average). You can use the current sell price of those scraps, how many you would likely get on average, and how much karma was spent. This would get the conversion rate.

That’s if you wanted to include a gold cost for karma used. I personally ignored that as the costs are usually pretty minimal and easy to be obtained.

This is the great thing about such a large community. I was thinking of developing a system like this. Just have not had time to do it. Wait a few days and there it is.

Really nice website thanks a lot ! Now i don’t have to grab my calculator everytime I want to craft stuff I intent to sell Yay !

I have completed the other main feature that I wanted to achieve when I started this website.

I often had the issue where I had some ingredients ingredients that I wanted to sell, but didn’t know if the best was to use this ingredient to craft something (and what to craft?) or to sell it directly to the trading post.

This is now solved, and for example, if I want to sell stacks of mithril ore, I can go to:
http://www.gw2craftgold.com/best-price-for-19700-Mithril-Ore

There are a few options: you can decide how you want to buy the other components needed (directly or through an offer) and how to sell the crafted item (again, directly or through an offer).
You can also specify how many ingredients you want to sell.
And lastly, you can select which recipes will be used for the computation.
The selected recipes are represented by the not user-friendly “green” switch on the left of each line (I definitely have to improve that some day)

Anyway, enjoy

Really great, thanks. I do have one suggestion. When using the ingredient sell function, consider having another column that lists the overall crafting profit percentage. When i’m trying to decide what to craft, I dont really care too much what the profit per item is, I care about my overall profit and that im using all of the mats efficiently. I"m at work and not able to really sit down and think about it fully. Maybe the info i’m thinking about corresponds to the profit/item you already have in there.

Hey Sroced, would it be possible to include a search functionality on the pages like “Maximum Profit”? Currently it just lists the top X items, but that doesn’t really help since a lot of items are very niche products that could take a long time to sell.

An interesting tool, thank you for posting. I would like to point out that users will need an understanding of what some of the items are. For lack of a better way to put it. For example when looking for maximum profit: http://www.gw2craftgold.com/recipe-details-5679-Vital-Bronze-Spear has only one sell listing at some ridiculously high amount while buy offers are likely low ball offers to get a quick flip from salvaged materials. Nobody in their right mind would pay 20g for that item. Unfortunately I also can’t think of a way if any at all possible to use this knowledge to improve the site. And the loss in gold to the listing fee for said item would be a consequence to someone who would think they could sell one for 20g. And I feel sorry for anyone that would happen to. I am being careful not to be insulting to any such person who would fit that and leaving out some words I would otherwise have said if I were saying this stuff to my friends in real life who play the game.

My DNS won’t resolve www.gw2craftgold.com this morning, is anyone else having that issue?

EDIT: Working again now, not sure what happened. Guess my DNS had some temporary issues, which is not new…

Ok, so let me try to answer to the different people here. I haven’t been more active as I spent my free time translating the website to french. I may do that for german and spanish as well, but I don’t speak any of the 2 languages so maybe there will only be the item names.

@Jayjaydee:When using the ingredient sell, I am trying to determine what is the best way to use this component in order to make gold. Therefore, I don’t really care about the profit percentage, but more the “profit per item unit”.
For mithril ore for example, I could either sell them directly to the TP, or craft mithril infgot and sell those ingots. Currently, selling an ingot gets you 92copper, so that gives you a total of 39copper per mithril ingot (taxes deduced).
Therefore, you would do better selling ingots directly (net profit: 40 copper / ingot).
So I don’t think the profit percentage matters too much. Please correct me if I am wrong!

@Zaxares: How would you see this search functionality? I plan to add more filters: entering part of the name of the item or the ingredients, filter by recipe not needing a recipe sheet, … Maybe that would help you

@Jia Shen: Yes, this point has been brought multiple times, but I don’t see what to do. You obviously have to trust your best judgement when thinking if you can possibly one day sell your item.

@Elric Of Melnibone: Well, my hosting provider is not the best (I might move to another at some point), so the website is unfortunately down from time to time. Usually though, it doesn’t take too long to have it back online.

Mmm, kind of. Let me try to explain.

Let’s say I go into the “Maximum Profit” page. I’ve got some excess Orichalcum and Powerful Blood and I want to see which craftable Exotics would net me the biggest profit. So, if there was a search bar that allowed me to type in, say, “Berserker”, it should display the various Berserker Exotics and let me see which of the items (e.g. Greatsword, Sword, Heavy Armor) offered the biggest profit for my mats.

@Zaxares: Ok, I think I got you, and this will be implemented when I will add new filters. Currently, you can browse http://www.gw2craftgold.com/best-price-for-19701-Orichalcum-Ore and http://www.gw2craftgold.com/best-price-for-24295-Vial-of-Powerful-Blood to see independantly the best way to sell Orichalcum Ore and Powerful Blood.

I also switch to a better (I hope!) hosting solution. This is why the website had some temporary issues and was not accessible, but it is now all fixed. This means that the item should be updated even more often + the pages should load faster!

Doesn’t this mean it won’t work anymor cause everyone knows now?

Technically, yes, but my own experience has shown me there’s always profitable niches to be found because the majority (the vast majority?) of players are lazy or don’t have the time to do the research themselves.

I’ve been selling Meaty Plant Food every single day for over two months now, and it’s STILL getting me a nice small profit, despite the fact that, if every single player with 400 Huntsman crafted one to sell each day, we would crash the price for it.

I am still using the tool regularly and you’ll be surprised as how often can we have good findings and profitable item. No later than yesterday, on the easy money page, there was a profit of nearly 1 gold to craft one object (which I of course did). So it’s still very viable to make profit.

I also added more filters: you can now remove recipes that need a recipe sheet (+ those recipes are now more visible) and/or add a filter on the crafted item name (eg “Berserker”)

I’m not sure I’m figuring out how the profit data is arrived at. For example http://www.gw2craftgold.com/recipe-details-3539-Carnelian-Silver-Ring

If you list each one at 9s28c you only get 7s89c each after TP fees. Not to mention the cost of buying the components or crafting them whichever is cheaper. In the case of this item it is cheaper to buy the components. If we go with lowest sale offer for immediate crafting of this item. That is 1s99c to craft each. Taking our actual profit to 5s90c each not the 8s88c indicated on the page.

Jia Shen.4217:

I’m not sure I’m figuring out how the profit data is arrived at. For example http://www.gw2craftgold.com/recipe-details-3539-Carnelian-Silver-Ring

If you list each one at 9s28c you only get 7s89c each after TP fees. Not to mention the cost of buying the components or crafting them whichever is cheaper. In the case of this item it is cheaper to buy the components. If we go with lowest sale offer for immediate crafting of this item. That is 1s99c to craft each. Taking our actual profit to 5s90c each not the 8s88c indicated on the page.

Would you list your calculations? I just glanced at that page and didn’t see anything wrong.

Sroced.9512:

@Zaxares: Ok, I think I got you, and this will be implemented when I will add new filters. Currently, you can browse http://www.gw2craftgold.com/best-price-for-19701-Orichalcum-Ore and http://www.gw2craftgold.com/best-price-for-24295-Vial-of-Powerful-Blood to see independantly the best way to sell Orichalcum Ore and Powerful Blood.

I also switch to a better (I hope!) hosting solution. This is why the website had some temporary issues and was not accessible, but it is now all fixed. This means that the item should be updated even more often + the pages should load faster!

Just look up the Exotic Zerker inscription, if you want to know which exotic zerker weapon yields the most profit.