(edited by MacChruim.1635)
Showing Posts For MacChruim.1635:
What I THINK people have been saying with “the wiki might be quicker” is:
“If you ask a question on the forum, you have to wait around for someone to see your question and then hope someone answers it quickly — and correctly — but if you look up a relatively common question on the wiki, the answer is already there and you’re right back to playing, no waiting required!” 
The casual players who aren’t farming 24/7 should be seeing the benefits of a “bot-less Tyria” when they sell any drops they get from “casual playing” and get more cash for those items.
Right, that’s true in the long term. Their drops will now sell for more, but the things they’d like to buy cost more too…. at least things on the tp.
In the short term, people with a lot of mats in the bank gained a bunch of value practically overnight. People with few mats and a lot of gold lost value overnight. Gold is value is in it’s purchasing power, people don’t like to see their purchasing power diminished. Those people would really like the bots back. It makes for fairly humorous conversations in map chat.
Sometimes I forget that I’m a “long term player” and don’t think about the “play something new for a month and move on to the next” gamers. I’ve only been here a month or so myself, and while I don’t have a -lot- of gold in the bank, I suffered the same feeling from the practically overnight inflation.
“Great, now my cash is worth about half as much as before!”
Still, I can’t help but think that this new economy will be better in the long term, and that this is certainly how ArenaNet had planned the economy. If they’d wanted swarms of “scavenger bots” running across the landscape, providing cheap materials, they could have written them into the lore. “Perpetual Motion Self-Repairing Mining and Reclamation Devices” or something with a snappier acronym. Sounds like something the asura might do. 
I see the base of problem in this game currently being two things which are really closely tied together: bots and gold sellers.
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But as I’ve witnessed personally in guild wars 2, there are lot of bots, and it often feels like bots sometimes out-populate real players, especially on unpopular maps. Sometimes it would be so bad that I’d see over 30~40 bots in a single map and a single digit of human players. They’re there 24/7 and days after I’ve reported them; a force much greater than humans.
According to this thread — https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Recent-Market-Shifts — ArenaNet has “recently begun a renewed campaign against RMT and Bots. The change in these markets is a direct result of the success of that campaign.”
I personally haven’t seen any armies of bots running around in the past few days, but I know that one person’s experience compared to the entire playerbase is statistically insignificant. 
Maybe I’m playing at the wrong time, or in the wrong zones.
However, the multiple “Why has the price of ______ spiked?” threads in this sub-forum this week, combined with the above linked thread, suggest that ArenaNet’s campaign IS working. Here’s hoping that they keep on top of the problem!
Here’s the simple math required to flip items:
Look at the sell price you intend to sell at. Multiply by 0.85.
This number is the price you can buy at to break even, you obviously want to buy items at a much lower number than this.The answer to your question is “no”. There is nothing on the trading post that has the A: margin to be flipped AND B: volume to be traded reliably.
All trading in GW2 is fundamental, which is the same thing as spending 70 minutes at Jorrmag hoping to find Dusk. (crapshoot roll of the dice).
ROFL, and wow — is this actually sarcasm or irony in search of an “emoticon?” Is this perhaps a clever ploy to say “no, these aren’t the droids…er, profit you are looking for — move along?”
There ARE plenty of items that can be flipped for a profit — and items that are flipped every single day. There are other items that (at least a few of us have noticed) tend to have prices that fluctuate during the course of the week. (I like to buy low mid-week and sell for a profit on the weekend.)
There are also a lot of items that get flipped “day trader” style where people see a large margin on Widgets, buy a couple hundred for the “bid low and wait price, plus one” and then try to quickly dump them by undercutting the lowest seller. Hilarity ensues when five or six people try to do that at the same time, and the margin between “bid low and wait” and “Buy It Now” shrinks until someone’s actually selling their Widgets at a loss. Then, everybody walks away from that “market niche” and eventually “market equilibrium” sets in and the margin becomes large enough for the cycle to repeat itself, over and over. Meanwhile, the “day traders” run off en masse to find (and accidentally collapse) other niches, ad infinitum.
As someone said in another thread, if you can’t find something to flip, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. There ARE high-volume, low profit niches out there that can easily net somone a gold (or more) per day with minimal work, or there are low-volume, high profit items that everybody and their brother try to undercut each other on.
Lastly, just because the margin on Widgets right now isn’t worth the time, investment, or hassle — that doesn’t mean that the margin won’t be worth it in six hours, or tomorrow, or in three days.
Wait — why AM I telling everybody this and cutting into my own profits!? (Besides the fact that the market itself [and flipping] preys on human emotions like greed and instant gratification — and until those go away, there will always be plenty of profit to go around!)
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for!”
Edit: just saw this part further up-thread:
What you earn is somewhat proportional to what you put in, so it’s true that a lot of capital helps. But it’s not a necessary barrier to overcome. I started flipping when I had about 1 gold to my name. If I invested more, I’d probably have more than the 20G I have now.
I started flipping when I had all the new equipment I needed on my character and one gold piece in the bank myself — which then became 2 gold, then 4 gold, and so on! Having more capital means it’s easier to invest in more niches, which means I’m not spending much of my profits yet, but I’m getting to the point where I can start buying “stuff.”
(edited by MacChruim.1635)
If this is indeed what’s causing your problem as well, it should definitely be addressed — “official” e-mails not counting AS e-mails is definitely a bug! (And it would be nice if we could get some sort of official confirmation and/or thread merge to prove that the powers-that-be are reading and/or aware of the problem.)
In the meantime, though, knowing what’s causing the problem* allows us to work around it and start getting e-mails again.
*And what exactly IS at the root of the problem? Are “official” e-mails NOT supposed to count towards the ten e-mail “cap” (explaining why they don’t show up in the “counter”) but they DO accidentally count? Or ARE they supposed to count towards the cap but they’re missing the code that flags the counter?
It’s all guesswork at this point — deleting excess e-mails worked for me, but the other person’s “thanks, solved my problem” is a little vague. Did s/he solve it by deleting excess e-mails as well, or by some other way? We’ll have to wait and see if indeed this is what’s causing your problem as well, but if it winds up being the same solution to all three of our problems, it looks like we’ve found the answer!