Guild Wars 2

Hello,

here is a question that bothers me for years, maybe you can enlighten me:

Whenever I browse the TP for equiping a character, I buy weapons and armor – blue and green gear mostly. Most of the stuff is rather cheap, but sometimes I come across a piece which is ridiculously overpriced. I compared the stats, the effects and the skin, nothing special. There usually exist weapons with the same stats for way lower prices. The skin is standard and can be aquired from other levels for way lower prices. And the runes/sigils are cheap as well.

At first, I thought it has to do with “playing the market.” So people would buy one of a certain kind, buy all on the market and set the price extremely high. And people like me, who just want to get good gear fast, just click without reading.

But to be honest, I have no clue at all. Anyone can explain this, please?

Some of that is weapons that are no longer in the game if I remember correctly like bronze sword or one of the low level staffs. Myself I can’t figure it out either but that is what people are willing to pay for a limited item.

Maybe people are putting out overpriced items in the hope someone buys them accidentially, or to look what makes them special. Nothing prevents you trying to sell normal item for huge pile of gold, normally it does not sell but sometimes it could.

There’s no “one size fits all” answer to this, but here’s one of the reasons:

If I remember right, it was the Cursed Pirate Artifact going for 100 Gold on the early days of GW2, this is a Quest item that is literally on the ground at Bloodtide Coast.
That’s because as soon as the first people got there and picked them up there wasn’t any entry on the TP, so they priced it at their discretion, as more people got in the price plummeted until what you see today, 2 Copper.

This was true for every item in the game, including Weapons and Armour, so why is it that today you get the odd item going for several Silver and sometimes a few Gold when it’s barely worth a few Silver?

Well, in part that’s thanks to Luck.

There was a time in GW2 where Blue and Green items weren’t even worth selling on the TP, because with the tax you’d get less money than if you sold them straight to the NPC’s. Still many people did and you had hundreds on Blue and Green items being sold for just +1 Copper than the NPC price, now remember like I said, there’s a listing and transaction fee, so people selling these were losing money.
When ANet introduced Luck, all of a sudden these items were worth buying so they could be salvaged not only for Materials, but for Luck as well.

So a lot of people bought in bulk items that had been left to rot on the TP, some even over paid and got rid of all the cheap ones, only leaving the more expensive ones.

Mind you most of these listings are probably really really old, since other than specific occurrences, ANet doesn’t delete any Buy/Sell orders, I have Buying/Selling orders that are almost as old as the game itself, just because you see a high price tag on something doesn’t mean anyone is buying or selling it.

Thank you for the long and detailed explanation. Sadly we cannot see the date the orders were placed. I remember other mmorpgs which work with an expiring-system, orders were only valid a few days and then removed/returned to creator.

The common explanation back then was, they had to do this in order to save storage on their servers. If ANet does not delete the old orders at all, I wonder if we may face a tp expiring system sooner or later.

Anyway, big thx for your time and work. It helps a lot ^^.

I have seen those too and I wondered if they could be a way of laundering gold.

It’s a case of most people don’t bother listing certain items, or not enough of them are in existence or being picked up by players. Others see this item with only 1-10 or so sell orders….buy them out and then pick the price to a ridiculous number that nobody would ever buy except by grievous error. I mean look at even good items and how they are priced…if you scroll down enough to the first few listings they are ridiculous numbers. The same is said for many newer items from HoT like the reclaimed weapon sets…as more people got them as drops the more got listed and the more the price came down a huge amount.

There are plenty of useless worthless things you can sell on the TP that nobody buys or sells….people in their infinite wisdom then just list it on the TP (since they are the only listing) at some stupidly high price hoping some1 will fall for it and buy it. I find it annoying since if I’m looking for special skins ill look at the most to least expensive….getting useless results of greens and blues that you would salvage with a basic kit is annoying. It’s also possibly gold sellers are using them to distribute their product under the radar. The Tp was setup to avoid nitpicking through orders and overpaying for items to avoid that….but when the base sell price is high enough it is an easy way to distribute gold.