Guild Wars 2

…sigh…

Did you even read my post? I stated at least twice that you would run into scalability issues. So you are essentially agreeing with me while trying to disagree with me.

It is extremely easy to make a 15% return each day by flipping items on the trading post. And I never said one individual item gives me that 15% return. I have a portfolio of 20-30 items at any given time. If you focus on items with high liquidity (i.e. crafting items) then you drastically reduce your systematic risk so you won’t be caught with your pants down when the market tanks.

And yeah I do think 15% return per day is low. For those of you doubting that, if you started with 1g, you would only have to make 15 silver. If you can’t do that in one day, quit posting on these forums as you probably don’t have valuable input to share.

And yes you could theoretically make 40,000g after two months on the low end. It’s called compounding returns. 15% per day and after two months you will be sitting on a huge amount of gold. Is that realistic? No, and I never said it was. It was simply a scenario to show how speculating is generally a bad idea. People use gold to buy items with, craft, etc. People also get bored of trading day in day out, at least I do. Not to mention the scalability issues you would eventually run in to. But if you continuously made a 15% per day return for 2 months, that’s how much gold you have. It isn’t my opinion, it’s a statistical fact.

If you want to compare this market to the stock market, fine. Speculators in the stock market generally wait YEARS before they see any returns. Most of them don’t see a return but rather get crushed. And in real life they have a hell of a lot more to lose. The stock market is also highly regulated. The Black Lion TP is hardly regulated, the only regulations being a 15% selling fee (10% tax plus 5% listing). This leaves an ample amount of arbitrage opportunities to exploit.

And if you read my post, without focusing on one paragraph or one single line … cough Osi… then you would have read that I agree the price of dragon coffers will go up. I just believe the opportunity cost of that investment is too large if you are serious about making money.

I think I understand what you were saying. How would you continue to make a 15% daily return when you have for example 5,000 gold or even 1,000 gold. At that point you wouldn’t really be able to play the TP because of the scalability issues you would encounter, but who would really care as you would be rich beyond your means? I was simply trying to provide an example of an opportunity cost of a speculative investment.

What value do the dragon coffers offer the consumer? The chance to get a jade weapon skin. The dragon coffers therefore have value, and will always have value post-event. People saying that the price will likely fall are likely wrong. Once the event ends, there will be no NEW dragon coffers entering the world. Eventually supply will dry up, and if anyone has taken a basic economics course, they know that when supply decreases, the equilibrium price rises and sometimes substantially.

Scenario 1
The price will most likely rise, but does this make it a good investment? Not necessarily. Lets say you invest 1 gold in these coffers (which I have translated to be $100,000 for calculations sake) and over the next two months the price of coffers triples. You then sell it for 3 gold ($300,000). Each month you realize a return of approximately 73%. Not bad… if this were real life.

Scenario 2
I play the trading post each day and my returns are roughly 15-25% returns (and I think that is low as I am still learning the economy). Now lets say that instead of investing in dragon coffers, you flip other items and make a conservative 15% each day. By the end of WEEK ONE you would have more than doubled your money. By the end of the two months, you would have made $438,399,875 or 43,839 gold. This translates to a 6,521% return PER MONTH.

It’s not a matter of will the price rise, its a matter of is it worth the investment. Because it is easy enough to make a modest 15% each day flipping items on the TP, I’d say it’s definitely not worth the investment. You will continue to be poor on Guild Wars.

One person mentioned that he spends his money a lot (I think?). Dragon coffers would be great for your situation as it will tie up your money so you can’t spend it