Guild Wars 2

Fractals actually dropped the price of lodestones, and cores when it was first implemented, because everyone was running fractals the first two weeks. Onyx cores and lodestones drop in the swamp and jade maw fractals. Charged cores and lodestones drop in the harpy fractal. People are running fractals a lot less now.

The charged lodestone and corrupted lodestone farm spots in the world also got destroyed in the wintersday patch, so Anet probably likes these high prices that only the super rich would buy at.

I got mail from a gold seller today stating they are selling legendaries now. It made me wonder whether they were part of the reason for these massive buyouts of lodestones and buy order wall spikes.

If the lodestone prices aren’t dealt with this coming week with the wintersday patch, I wouldn’t expect the prices to come down anytime soon. Prices will most likely rise even more with people running the wintersday stuff over fractals, dungeons, or farming.

They could always lower the rate at which the waypoint is contested. They increased the waypoint contestion rate for CoF when people were mass farming path 2. I don’t remember if they did the same with Arah when people were shard farming the first boss. With the exodus of people from cursed shore, it would make sense to increase the waypoint contestion time. Anet will never get rid of the contestions though. It’s their way of preventing people from overfarming a dungeon in case any exploits like the 5 minute arah shard farm popped up.

Kid Taylor.5479:

So somehow when Joe the Plumber wants to buy doubloons for his legendary, and finds the cost jacked up to ridiculous heights, that’s beneficial to him?

What’s happening to silver doubloons isn’t flipping. The market manipulation happening with silver doubloons had the market manipulator buying up most of the sell orders up to a price he deemed fit, and then setting up buy order walls no one can fill due to the rarity of the item. When impatient people unwilling to wait for this buy order wall to be fullfilled as it would take a ridiculously long time given the low drop rate of the item, they start placing buy orders at prices above this wall. Eventually, the manipulator can get rid of this buy order wall he set up as there are enough real buy orders at this new price point. Both the buy orders and the sell orders are increased in this scenario.

The way the OP described flipping involves no massive withdrawal of supply to drive up sell order prices. The sell order prices are actually lowered from flipping as the flipper is getting the items from buy orders, and most likely undercutting the lowest sell order. Buy order prices are increased by the flipper in this case.

I believe the economist said a global market would be less prone to manipulation…Well, that’s true for items with decent drop rates. If the drop rates across all servers weren’t so kittening bad… I also don’t understand why they would ever let anyone buy up several stacks of lodestones or setup several buy order walls of 100 lodestones each. Only reason anyone would bother doing these things is to manipulate the prices for their own benefit.

If you’re looking for vertical progression and a new bis tier, you got it with ascended gear. You want expensive gear that costs a full stacks of ectos and t6 mats? Well you got that too with ascended gear… You want to take a long time to acquire said gear? You got that as well as the ascended rings drop randomly from a chest at level 10+ fractals daily.
From your last post, you may wanna check out fractals and the new gear, and see if it’s to your taste. The top people running the highest level fractals are doing so for the challenge and not for the gear. If you’re going for the gear, you could probably just stop at level 20 fractals, since you don’t get any new gear from higher level fractals. You do get more fractal relics. I don’t believe there is an actual limit to the fractal levels. However, it will be limited by how much agony resist your group has, as eventually the agony ticks will 1 shot everyone.

majorkong.9073:

Tyr.2489:

Wow just another reason to stay away from the MF unless you are crafting a guaranteed recipe.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Again I’ve done I don’t know how many tens of thousands of combines and this has never once happened to me.

It’s one bugged recipe. Just don’t put green swords in it and you’ll be fine.

The items that you are mystic forging might be fine, but it’s not just one bugged recipe. Having done hundreds of rare combines under level 70, have resulted in numerous drops in rarity down to greens and blues for me. I still make a profit over the combines, but the drops in rarity with those items is something that I have to take into account.

You may wanna wait a couple days on the T6 mats. They all seem to be steadily dropping in price right now. I wouldn’t bother with lodestones either, at least not onyx or charged lodestones. Those items are being heavily manipulated.

Those ingredients are for the gift of magic… The gift of might uses bone, claw, fang and scale.

The rarity of the item you get back from the mystic forge can drop in rarity. For me, it’s been pretty rare when I’m forging rares, but when the drop in rarity seems to come in streaks for me. If I get a drop in rarity once, I more often than not get a drop in rarity again. You can get blues from putting rares in the mystic forge, and if Zomorros is in a really trolling mood, you can even get nothing… While your streak is particularly bad, it is statistically possible.

Just remember that if the second round of legendaries come out soon, the demand and consequently the price on charged lodestones will shoot up even more.

Dinkus.6480:

Those of you with so much capital that you are a market maker…why are you playing this game? You already have the best stuff and you spend your time in LA….why not do something in RL for money instead?

They’ll have the capital when Anet implements new legendary weapons, maybe legendary armor. They take a couple minutes to mess with the market, log off, come back, reap the profits and repeat

panikos.8309:

Tulisin.6945:

Once you’ve got the ascended gear you want, I’d look towards some of the other dungeons simply because you can easily convert their tokens into ectos.

If you don’t have two ascended rings and a backpiece with stats you like, though, fractals all the way.

In my personal experience normal dungeon drops (including bags) are not worth it. Greens and blues most of the time. I did a fractals 4 yesterday and walked out with 4 rares. One of my guildies got exotic on top of it. On my best run I got an exotic from a harpy (named armor piece) and another from the last chest(some named bow) in the in that asura-ratasumlike fractal +3 rares. That was a lvl2 run.
What Im saying is that in the time that will take you to do 3 paths of a dungeon so you can get an exotic with tokens you will have probably dropped 2 from fractals runs +a bunch more rares. Thats ofc If your only interest is gold

You got really lucky on those runs with the exotic drops. It’s pointless to state your best run, since there are people that have gotten precursors from the older dungeons on their best run. You may have a higher chance of getting exotics and rares from fractals, but the gold and tokens you get from the other dungeons are guaranteed. My past several fractal runs, I only got 2 rares, and a couple t6 mats from each run. AC runs with decent group take 15-20 minutes, and you’re guaranteed around 85 silver per run (with omnomberry bar buff). Cof path 1 can be done in 10 minutes with a decent group.

T6 mats and ectos got expensive mainly because Anet added ascended gear that required stacks of them. The lost shores patch also dropped a lot of exotics, and precursors. They also apparently nerfed the drop rate of rares in cursed shore. The increased precursor drop rate in the chest probably would have never happened had people in the forums not complained so much about precursors. In a similar vein, the complainers here are probably hoping that Anet does something about the mat prices, since they are ultimately the ones that control the economy. People are not just going to “deal with it” if they don’t like where the economy is going, since they obviously want it to change.

People that had issues lost shores event and never receieved a chest, have been getting chests today. It seems like they’re issuing the chests in waves, so expect more precursors on the market.

I don’t think you fully understand some of the complaints laid out. It is quite a bit harder now to get a legendary than it was a month ago. Rare drops have been nerfed in cursed shore, ascended gear has driven the demand for t6 mats and ectos to prices 4+ times higher than they were a month ago. Most of the precursor prices have gone back to the prices they were pre-lost shores patch. Lodestones are subject to manipulation again as most people have stopped running fractals. I don’t care about how many people have gotten their legendaries. I am aware that it’s supposed to take a long time to obtain. I just want to know that I won’t have to farm another month after I reach a benchmark only to have found out that another piece of the legendary has tripled in price, and will require more than twice as long to get now.

Well, you are the one that decided to go for one of the most expensive non-legendary exotics in the game. The prices on lodestones spiked yesterday due to manipulators, but they seem to be going back down now. I do agree that lodestones are currently quite hard to obtain, and hope Anet will do something about it. Anet did introduce a new location fo get lodetones through fractals. Charged lodestones/cores can also drop from the chests in the harpy fractal. This actually lead to a fairly substantial drop in lodestone prices the first week of fractals. Now that the fractal craze has died down a bit, and less people seem to be running them, the prices are increasing agian.

Gold is definitely the limiting factor for most people trying to get legendaries. I have my mystic clovers, the skill points, and the karma. I still need about another 200 gold for the lodestones and remaining t6 mats, up from around 160 gold a day ago, because of manipulation of lodestones yesterday. Similar manipulation is going on with silver doubloons. The op’s post is not literally saying the legendary is unreachable, but rather, the amount of effort needed to gain a legendary is increasing at an alarming rate.

High demand, low supply items like lodestones and silver doubloons can be easily manipulated by the rich at everyone else’s expense. DR makes farming these items completely unviable as they are mostly available in 1 or 2 spots, and in the case of lodestones, I might get enough cores to make 1 lodestone in 3 dungeon runs if I’m lucky.

If your account gets hacked, the hackers are probably saavy enough to check your trading post activity. If they don’t mail the stuff to their other accounts, they would probably just fulfill buy orders on everything that you have, and take that gold with them.

Why shouldn’t the dungeon rewards be salvageable. You’re spending a good chunk of your time getting the tokens . Each rare costs 30 tokens at least, so you can get around 2 rares per path once a day.

This link talks about several different builds that mesmers run in higher level fractals:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/75587-12-fractals-build/

Tanky build is definitely not the only option, especially for mesmers. We have lots of ways to avoid damage. Good luck ressing people in the harpy fractal on higher levels when everyone is bunched up together. As another poster suggested, if you like the reflection aspect of the mesmer, you should consider traiting into the vitality line for focus cdr, and reflection on iwarden. You may also wanna consider using the staff as it’s probably a mesmer’s best group support weapon with chaos storm, and winds of chaos. The staff aside from iWarlock relies almost completely on condition damage for damage.

Centaur runes make no sense in fractals, since most of your time will be spent fighting, not running, and you don’t want to waste your heals for a swiftness buff that won’t be done when you reach the next point.

I don’t know if it’s the same person, but there was similar group of people over at gw2guru that was manipulating chocolate bars as well.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/76013-buy-group/

It might not have been just one guy, but a group of people. For bag space, they probably have a bunch of character slots, since I’m currently unaware of what the limit to number of characters you can have. The market was clearly manipulated for chocolate. If you look at the charts for chocolate bars, there was a sudden 500k increase of buy orders at around 60c on November 27, 2012, and then a subsequently curious 500k drop in the buy orders yesterday after the manipulators sold their supply and made their profit.

The image also seems to shift. I just saw a guy with sunrise dancing in place. The color and image on the greatsword seemed to change every time he ran through one cycle of the dance.

Fishbait is correct, the image does change since the greatswords are a window into the sky/space. Most of the angles seem to make sunrise appear more like the second image but with different colors from yellow to red to blue.

The first week fractal craze is also over, and fewer people are running fractals now, which was where the influx of lodestones and cores were coming from. I think the greatsword precursors are back to the prices they were at shortly before the cursed shore patch. Though the price will probably increase to the level you mentioned given the price of rare greatswords, unless they actually did significantly increase precursor forge rate. However, given how borked the drop rates were last patch, it woudn’t be surprising if the forge rate actually decreased lol.

Well it seems like they already setup a 500k buy order wall in the 60c range…The market manipulation is getting pretty ridiculous. Unfortunately, it seems playing the tp is the only way to make decent money, since arena net seems to hate legit farmers as much as botters given all the dr, and nerfs to drop rates that have been happening. The price might spike again when wintersday is announced similar to what happened to pumpkins. Just be careful about selling at the right time, since chocolate will probably just be a part of cooking recipes. They will probably have something similar to candy corn for wintersday, so people aren’t completely screwed over by manipulators.

A group of market manipulators are jacking up the price of chocolate. Would be a horrible idea to buy now. They seem to be fairly hard to get now with the recent nerf in the drop rates in bags, which makes it hard for the prices to go down.

You are aware that some people playing the trading post already have an inordinate amount of wealth. The economy is far from balanced as it is. If you want to make a lot of gold effectively, you play the trading post.