Guild Wars 2

On March 20th, they were about 13 copper each. Someone bought up half of the outstanding supply (about 20,000 of them). This was 11 days before SAB came back, and as I remember, the wig could not be converted to baubles before this SAB.

Any speculation as to what happened here?

Short answer: People were guessing that SAB might come back well before it happened, as they did the year before. So it’s not hard to imagine that someone might have decided to gamble on that happening and demand jumping up.

Long answer: Looking at Spidy (and bearing in mind I’m by no means an expert on these things) I’m not quite sure what happened.

If you look at the total history what happened recently is nothing compared to past activity. Most notably between the 18th and 21st December 2014 sell listings went from over 300,000 to just over 10,000, resulting in a price rise from 5c each to 74c each. At the time SAB had been gone for over a year and the items had no use unless you had a mini Moto left over.

The same thing happened (on a smaller scale) in November 2015 and then again as you said in March 2016.

My guess is that every so often someone would notice they’re no longer available and incredibly cheap and buy them up hoping for SAB to return and/or a new use for them to come out and demand to jump up.

Which is not totally unreasonable considering Anet have introduced new uses for old items in an attempt to get them out of the system before. This time around it may have actually paid off. Although I’m not sure it’d justify storing 290,000 (over 1000 stacks) of the things for over a year.

Comment about storage. If they buy them on an alt account, they can let them sit in the trading post pickup for as long as they like. They don’t have to find a place for them in a guild bank or inventory. Or they can immediately relist at a high enough price to get a profit if sold.

Nice analysis Danikat. This one was like hitting the long shot at the track!

As Danikat said:

• Nothing unusual about the speculation prior to April Fool’s (and it wasn’t even the most extreme buy out).
• Nothing unusual about people buying up cheap stuff in massive bulk hoping for a big score.