There are things you can profit by flipping, but the difficulty is that they’re not always the same things and it can take a lot of work for new traders to find out which things are profitable. I’ve done well at times flipping middle-tier fine crafting materials, because they move reliably enough to be fairly low-risk, without moving so quickly as to almost never have any margin (the way common materials usually do).
I posted a plea for Arenanet to close the gem store and it was redacted because it was not conducisive to the thread. Arenanet please close the gem market.
It should honestly be redacted here, too, because I can’t see what on Earth it has to do with the topic of this thread, which is about flipping items on the trading post. What do gems have to do with that?
I figured it would be more noticeable than having the question lost in a sea of complains on the stickied thread.
More noticeable than the thread called, “November 15th Massive Update: Precursors Addressed?”
>.. and then Arthur, in all his glory, took upon himself the four exquisitely made longswords he had collected, and threw them into the Lake, only to have one of lesser value hefted back at him.
“Kittens!” said Arthur, as he stuffed the lesser sword into his pack. “I shall have to go forth, and farm’eth three more swords to pitch’eth into the lake now!”
Suddenly, Galahad rode by on his mighty steed, proudly waving the Legendary sword Excalibur to and fro, light glistening off the mystical blade.
“HAHA Chinese goldfarmer kittenhole!” shouted Arthur, throwing horse feces at yonder Galahad.
“L2FARM NOOB” responded Galahad, before riding off to meet his international friends, the identical Rangers Qqqqffffff, Qqqqffffgg & Qqqqfffggg to whom he owed much.
Funny, perhaps, but definitely not “spot on” or whatever other people said. You’re assuming the same sour-grapes/jealousy nonsense so many others have, believing that the only possible way someone else could possibly have a legendary is through some kind of illegal activity or exploit.
Our opinions don’t matter in this thread. Only the devs. He asked a simple question. Hope he gets a simple answer.
If there is an answer, why would it be in this thread rather than the stickied official response thread at the top of the forum?
Someone who truely is an expert at say making clothes, makes money because they are good at making clothes, the make cooler looking, higher quality clothes (in theory) How well they can be marketed is a different issue.
No, it isn’t. A master tailor makes money because they are good at making the clothes people want to buy. If what they make can’t be marketed, the person can’t make money.
Adding a quality rating to items might help in the middle levels, but would it have much effect on stuff created by 400-level crafters?
The fact that there are only 5 listed means there aren’t even remotely enough of them. Such a low supply will always be subject to instability. The fact is, legendaries as they are now can hardly be considered game content. They may as well not exist for all the benefit it brought to the game and it’s players. Maybe a few dozen people can go for it but the rest of us are pretty much cut off. It’s content we don’t get to experience because we either don’t have hours and hours of game time every day or because we’re not into hardcore TP trading.
So amid all the people saying people who just want cheaper/easier legendaries don’t really exist, we have you saying there should be more of the precursors. Which can only happen if they are cheaper or easier to obtain.
Most of us should be cut off from them, unless we put a ton of effort into it, because that’s what makes them “legendary”. If something is changed so you can make definite measurable progress toward getting a precursor, it shouldn’t simultaneously make them easier to obtain. More predictable, perhaps, but not cheaper or easier.
Again: the crafting booster just means you’ll make progress faster, but you won’t make any more progress total.
Dusk @ 500g, still no response on issue…
Back down below 400, still no response needed.
It looks like both Dusk and Dawn had someone recently buy up multiple sell listings, which left only the more expensive ones remaining. I would personally expect Dawn to fall back down like Dusk already has, but admittedly such a small market can be pretty volatile.
Are you in a guild, or do you have friends who play? They could lend you the listing fee.
I don’t give a … about a gold sink or the economy, that’s all Anet making money and whatnot but why have it in the making of a legendary ?
The economy is important because it affects everyone in the game. If there’s not enough gold sinks, we get inflation. If there aren’t item sinks, those items are oversupplied and their value plummets.
And don’t tell me to buy it off TP, RNG is still the initial way how they are aquired. Also for me it costs 400g (legend) and when I started farming for my legendary it costed 100-120g. Yeah well done. 300g increase, that has simply kittened me up. By the time I reach that, it may be over 500g.
The fact that it was undervalued at the start doesn’t mean anything whatsoever. The Legend has been fairly stable for two weeks. It might go up temporarily if someone decides to buy up a bunch of sell listings, which appears to be what happened with Dusk, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be a permanent change.
@kaspi.7164
The mistake you are making is assuming that the people complaining actually understand how the legendaries work with respect to the economy overrall. The irony is w/o the mystic forge sucking out those rares and crafting material we will end up in a situation where the value of goal is extremely low.
But sadly their most of them believe a long term goal should be instantly achievable.
As people keep pointing out, making it easier isn’t necessarily everyone’s goal here. (Though the people who complain about wasting 100g or less in hopes to obtain something selling for 300g probably do simply wish they could be in the exclusive club for way less effort.)
—
A suggestion I’ve seen that would maintain the item sink and the average total difficulty, but which would at the same time make the process more predictable, would involve some kind of (account-bound) MF token. You could get some number of these (or even just some chance of getting at most 1) from each MF combine of items high enough level to possibly get a precursor. While you still might get the precursor after only a few attempts, you could also eventually forge it directly. Say, by putting one level 80 exotic of the same type into the forge along with 3 stacks of the tokens.
And then the drop rate for tokens could be adjusted to keep the precursors just as rare as (or even rarer than) they already are, on average, while also making it clear how much progress people are making toward definitely being able to get one.
For example, suppose a combine of level 80 rares had a 50% chance of dropping a single token. And assume that the precursor’s direct drop rate stays at about 0.1% for an input of 4 level 80 rares. Then after 1000 combines, if you still hadn’t gotten your precursor, at least you’d have about 500 of these tokens. Do another 500 combines and you’ll likely have nearly the full 750 you need.
Sure, it’s still technically RNG, but a much more forgiving and predictable version. Furthermore, it would still eat up rares and exotics and would still keep precursors at about the same price they already are.
—
(For a note on the math: with 0.1% drop rate on precursors, there’s a 37% chance you won’t get one after 1000 tries, and there’s still a 13.5% chance you won’t have one after 2000, and a 5% chance you won’t have one even after 3000. With a 50% drop rate on tokens you need 750 of, the variance is much lower. Sure, there’s a 50% chance you won’t have your full 750 after 1500 forge attempts, but at that point there’s something like a 97% chance that you have at least 700 of them.)
Most of the people that are against having the system changed have already gotten their legendary/precursor and would rather the system not change so they have exclusivity for as long as possible.
I doubt this is true at all, since I don’t think I’m alone among the people opposed to most of the suggested changes, despite having less than 10g total on all my characters, including the gold value of equipment.
But even if it is true that people who already have legendaries want to maintain their exclusivity, that’s only relevant in response to suggestions to make it far easier to obtain. And yet, every time someone posts in one of these threads saying they shouldn’t be easy to obtain, since they’re called “legendary” for a reason, they get shouted down as arguing against a straw man. “We don’t want them easier,” they claim, “we just want to know we’re making progress over time.” There have even been suggestions to make it harder on average (i.e. more exclusive and more expensive) than it currently is, just so long as it’s a goal toward which you can make measurable progress.
So if it’s true that the people complaining aren’t simply whining that it’s too hard, then it must also be true that people arguing against them aren’t doing so simply because they want the precursors club to remain exclusive. Because if the complainers aren’t asking for the process to be made easier, then they’re not asking for the club to become less exclusive. They just want it to be easier to predict who will be in it and how much longer they themselves can expect to wait.
They have said all they need to about precursors at this point, which is that they are watching prices and will make changes if they see fit. Since prices haven’t changed all that much since that statement, I’m not sure what you’re expecting from them now.
Being active in the forum community isn’t the same as replying to each and every one of the dozens of new threads started by people complaining about how gosh-darned expensive precursors are.
Yeah, levels 1-15 scale differently, and experimental evidence with crafting suggests that the scaling allows you to traverse all 15 of them with about as much time and effort as any 9 or 10 levels starting from a higher point.
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Then it’s a simple matter of division of labor, like any market. People who like gambling can do so and post their precursors on the TP, and people who don’t like gambling can earn gold and buy their precursors off the TP.
Getting a precursor on your first try is a thousand times more likely than failing after 15000 tries, so that’s not a very good comparison.
No, I’m afraid you’re the one who doesn’t seem to get how RNG works. I mean, yes, it is possible to do 15k forges and get nothing, in the sense that nothing in the game code guarantees this won’t happen. But the odds against that happening are about 3.3 million to 1 (assuming 0.1% chance per attempt, which jives with most numbers people are posting).
To put that in perspective, you are five times more likely to draw a royal flush right off the top of a shuffled deck of cards than you are go make 15k attempts without a precursor.
@Snow.5269
What did you do with all the exotics you got out of the Forge? If you were putting in exotics, what did you do with the named ones you got out?
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
The fact that you can get output worth less than input doesn’t change the fact that the method is profitable on average. If you’re paying 1.29g per attempt and half result in 79s junk exotics while the other half get you 1.8g or more, you’re making a profit in the long run.
Edit: Haha, apparently my point wasn’t actually necessary. I’m now really confused about what TP ChairGraveyard is looking at.
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
regarding the 4th point… The OP is completely accurate, and John is the one who is completely wrong.
How is John completely wrong? For the 4th point, John referred to Astraea’s post, which said
there are numerous factors behind this including oversupply due to the ease of learning crafting and a corresponding lack of demand. In addition, some people are willing to make a monetary loss for the XP gain they receive. Regardless of the cause, there are some items that crafters are able to make a profit on, but it’s something they have spent time and effort towards researching.
What about that is completely wrong, or even at all wrong? It’s not denying that most crafted items are unprofitable. It merely explains why that is the case and correctly points out that not all items are equally unprofitable.
That will only alienate the portion of the population that wants gems but doesn’t want to spend real money on it.
This is a much smaller portion than those who want gold. (Basically, “those who want gold” is everyone, while “those who want gems but are unwilling to spend real money” is less than everyone.)
Give a 2,000 item limit at each specific price point, and if one price point fills up you may not post that item at that price point until that price point and the one above it hit zero.
That is an absolutely terrible idea, because all it really accomplishes is artificially keeping supply down with no real benefit. For items that trade in the hundreds of thousands, a 2k (or even 200k) limit at one price point would be rather crippling, and wouldn’t provide any benefit.
Personally, I think at least 6 months for a legendary is totally reasonable. It’s supposed to be legendary, after all. What legendary feat only takes a couple months of work?
If you’re trading expensive items, though, the 10-20 gold listing fee can be well worth avoiding. Especially if the reason you want to avoid it is because you simply don’t have that much money available.
Still I guess there are alternatives. One could allow selling to buy orders and taking the listing fee out of the proceeds; I don’t have a problem with this, but often you’ll make significantly less doing this than you would putting up a sell order.
One option for sell orders would be to charge the listing fee on sale as well as on taking the item down, but I’m not convinced that this would be a good idea.
I like both of these ideas, personally. Why do you think taking the fee upon removing a listing (instead of upon posting it) might be a bad idea? I’m not seeing how someone could abuse that, but maybe I just lack imagination.
But the way things are now, people who actually spend money on the game are punished for 30%.
How do you figure? It seems pretty symmetrical to me:
Gems → gold gives you 30% less gold than you would need to buy that many gems.
Gold → gems gives you 30% fewer gems than you would need to buy that much gold.
The real issue is that gold sellers prices being 6 TIMES better than legit prices means the gold sellers are WINNING.
No, really it means they are losing, if they can’t make a profit charging any more than a measly 1/6 of ANet’s prices.
And I don’t buy the line about hyper-inflation. The risk of hyper-inflation is the same whether the gold comes from Arena Net, or from botting and gold selling. The origin of extra gold has no bearing on it’s effect on the economy.
When you exchange gems for gold, ANet doesn’t just create a bunch of new gold out of nowhere. It essentially comes from the players who have already spent gold on gems. Which means that all the gold in the game comes from events and vendors and achievements, plus whatever (fictitious) buffer ANet keeps track of so transactions are instantaneous.
You have to hit Enter to lock it in, and then click to craft.
Well, there is already a post in the BLTC forum from someone who’s certain these will become way more valuable after the event ends. That same person might account for the majority of those 300 orders?
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
You don’t actually need to Poisson it up unless you’re interested in the total number of successes in some large number of trials. If you’re only interested in the number of trials to expect before getting your first success, it’s a simple geometric distribution.
Because 0.1 is approximately (499/500)^1150, every 9 you want in the probability costs you 1150 trials:
90% chance = 1150 (i.e. a 10% chance of taking longer than that)
99% chance = 2300 (a 1% chance of taking longer than that)
99.9% chance = 3450
99.99% chance = 4600
And so on.
But of course, we’re a lot more likely to hear from people on the unlucky tail of that distribution than on the lucky side, because the people who post on game forums seem disproportionately to be the unhappy ones. So between the 0.2% of people who get it on their first try and the 0.2% who still don’t have it after their 3104th, I suspect we tend to hear a lot more from the latter group.
I for one do not understand player disdain for pay-to-win. If the market is going towards a free to play game model, one must understand that developers need to make money.
Yup, which they can do by selling cosmetic and novelty items in the gem store, along with utility products like character slots and bank tabs and additional bag space.
Sure, you’ve also got people whining that the ability to trade gems for gold inherently makes this game pay to win, but I really don’t think that’s the case so long as non-paying players still have access to all the same functional items.
Pay-to-look-the-prettiest is not the same as pay-to-win, in other words.
World First Legendary Eternity Updated with recipe and video
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
A few hours a day is not nearly enough to get all of the other things necessary for a legendary, let alone 2. Buying gems will at best get you the precursor. It won’t get you karma or crafting levels or whatever else you need.
Yes, there’s been nothing from ANet in 3 weeks, and the prices really haven’t gone up much in that time, so I don’t know why you’d expect them to be planning anything precursor-related at this point.
Yeah, I’ve never heard anything official to the effect that trade by mail is against any rules.
Sure, you’re avoiding the gold sink, but you’re also missing out on the security and worldwide-ness of the TP, so it’s a tradeoff, not an exploit.
Except, not really a limited supply, since there are still a few days left for pretty much anyone who wants one of these to get ahold of it. Depending for your investment return almost entirely on people who have yet to buy GW2 doesn’t seem like a very sound strategy.
Candy corn itself, on the other hand, may very well rise quite a bit after its supply is cut off.
Yes, almost no honest person has 400g. And almost nobody should reasonably have a weapon properly called “Legendary”. So that in principle isn’t a problem.
All drops can be turned into money, Karma can get you many of the same things as money, XP gets you skill points needed for MF recipes as well as being something people are obviously willing to spend money on since crafting is generally a net gold sink for most players.
You aren’t awarded 1.xx silver for an event in Orr. You’re awarded 1.xx silver and a bunch of xp and a bunch of karma and all the drops and xp from everything you killed along the way.
I don’t have any love for the Godskull cheaters, so I think this is a great idea.
what does godskull have to do with the valid opposition made on this thread???
Didn’t you know? Anyone who has more than you in GW2 must have gotten it through the Godskull exploit. There’s just no other explanation at all!
The point is that not everyone is trying to maximize profit exactly the same way as you. And even if it’s not selling quickly at 13s, it’d still sell more quickly at that price than at 16s.
Yeah, I don’t see why the only options the OP gave were bot or moron. It could just as easily be someone who didn’t think the thing would sell for 85% more than the highest buy order, so decided to reduce it to only 50% more than the highest buy order. Which is much more likely to sell quickly while still offering a nice opportunity for profit if others are willing to sell to the highest buy order.
Yeah, making them account bound would likely anger more of the people who get them, without really helping anyone. Get Dusk but wanted Dawn? Too bad. Get one you can’t use as a boss drop or by combining different item types in the forge? Too bad. Already have Dawn, trying to get Dusk to make Eternity, get another Dawn instead? Too bad.
Meanwhile every single person who would rather just buy a precursor instead of having to deal with RNG is also suddenly out of luck.
Your characters themselves are things you get in a virtual world, and you paid $60 for five of them.
Please try again with more sense this time.
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Who is claiming the system is fine? The guy you replied to didn’t. You were just a miserable failure at understanding his post, opting instead to throw around the ever-present Godskull accusation, because it’s apparently so much easier than even the most basic reading comprehension.
And for the record, I for one didn’t even download the game until after the whole Godskull fiasco, so you’ll have to come up with some other excuse to dismiss every point I made, as that one couldn’t possibly apply.
Putting 40 exotic level 80 Staffs into the Mystic Forge and guess what happened?
in Crafting
Posted by: Hippocampus.8470
Wxnko.8103:I hope you do realize that 20000 rares by 15s a piece would cost 3000g. No one is going to buy your lie.
Let me guess, you exploited yourself a bunch of precursors and free gold using the Godskull exploit cheat?
Thought so.
As far as I’m concerned, Godskull exploit cheaters such as yourself don’t even have a say in this.
Um, wat? You’re unwilling to acknowledge what the guy said because you decided (based on exactly nothing) that he must have exploited, and yet you’re willing to believe a guy on reddit had 3000g?
Because the reason doesn’t want to believe your post is the improbability of having 3000g, not the improbability of getting a precursor from that many combines.
And of course what any of this has to do with continued bitterness and whining about months-old Godskull exploits is way beyond me.
(edited by Hippocampus.8470)
It’s nuts when you consider paying that much for it outright, sure. But when you consider that it’s supposed to take hundreds of hours of play time to be able to get that much gold, it’s less crazy. Hundreds of hours of your time should be worth $1000, or else you’re not valuing your time highly enough.
I’m one of those players who is rather confused by how this is so game-breaking for so many people. I am by no means a power gamer. I play at most a few hours a day. My level 80 character salvages (and banks the mats) all whites, vendors all blues, throws all greens into the forge, and salvages rares for ectos. Which is to say, I don’t get a whole lot of money from item drops because the only ones I usually sell are blues.
And yet, despite using waypoints to travel quickly, even occasionally all the way across the map because I just heard a dragon’s up somewhere and I don’t want to waste time on the loading screens involved with the Mists route, I always stop playing with more money than I had at the start.
Sure, it’s not a lot more, and I’d obviously have to change my playstyle pretty radically if I decided I want to ever have a legendary weapon, but I still manage to make money in the long run and don’t have to change how I play in order to do so.
Yeah, anyone who has ever actually checked their inventory after listing an item could tell you that the 5% listing fee is taken out when you first put it up, and then 10% is taken out if it sells.
so you saw an almost identical spike in the graph.
They’re not almost identical, they’re exactly identical. If you use gw2spidy to look at the entire history of gold-gem rates, you’ll see that every price change that happens in one also happens in the other.
This is a clear sign that ANet really just has one rate, and we get two due to transaction fees.