Guild Wars 2

Thrumdi.9216:

The problem with this is that it still disadvantages small groups in WvW vs. large groups.

It means that a group of 20 will do 100% damage against a group of 5 players. But, those same five players with only do 55% damage against the group of 20.

The results are already borne out in WvW: zerging overwhelming all other forms of play.

I don’t understand, this solution is better than currently exists. Currently, a group of 20 will 100% damage against a group of 5. However, the group of 5’s AoE can only hit 5 people, so the AoE is doing 25% of what it should. 55% > 25%, so the 5 man would be better off with this

Letifer.4360:

All crafting disciplines are only useful for leveling your character and to make Rares to break into ectos it’s sad but its the reality.

All crafting disciplines except cooking (and now jewelcrafting) have high, consistent profits if you know where to look. There is still money to be made jewelcrafting, really, it’s just less due to decreased demand and increased ori prices. You can still make 10%+ ROI for exotic jewels if you know what you’re doing

Look at the laurel vendor and all his tabs of stuff. You can get utility slots on amulets/rings i thing

thor.3904:

Durian.5419:

thor.3904:

Kinda sad that there is no Berserker type of jewelry added.

You can make Berserker jewlery. It’s the Ruby stuff.

I know, but I’d rather spend my karma (that I have no use for) then my mats/gold.

RIP profits from crafting exotic jewelry

That being said, I’ve definitely seen evidence of bots on the TP, so it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. For example, take Cured Coarse Leather Square on Jan. 2 http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19734 whose price jumped to 10s from 50c while the sections responded by going up to 2s. The refined material was worth way more than the material itself, and my friend made 50g buying the sections and refining them into squares, selling the squares for the inflated price, and having them sell instantly. The only explanation I could think of for this behavior is a buy program that didn’t turn off properly.

When I place bids like that I spend the 10-15 minutes placing them, then immediately go through and remove/replace bids that are overcut. Get as few as 3-4 people doing this concurrently and you’re bound to have instances of “instant 1c higher”

Shikigami.4013:

I came to this game because people got bans for exploiting the karma weapons. Not despite, but because. I was playing Lineage2, a game that I really liked but it had cheaters all over the place. Not just some. Not just loads. They were everywhere.
You could not play anywhere without running into botted players, not goldfarmerbots named Lughyfghenjnf but normal regular player chars, who were undoubtedly and obviously botting. This game, that I really liked, was totally ruined by the lenient stance NCSoft took on cheating, and I was extremely happy to find a new game that appealed to me where the company actually would do something against cheaters. And hey, I have absolutely no fear of getting banned. None. Not for exploiting, not for making hundreds of gold on the auction house by loophole recipes, not for botting. I am absolutely confident that my account will be neither “hacked” nor banned ever, even years from now. Just as my Lineage2 accounts.

Now you on the other hand give gold away on a regular basis to all sorts of random people and then wonder that you get caught by a ban? Oh my, who would have thought this could happen. Maybe a sensible person would realize that sending numerous mails with sizeable amounts of gold to random people who are absolutely not affiliated with your account is exactly what goldsellers are doing? And no, just because you somehow managed to successfully play “Trade Wars 2” and make a fortune on the auction house does not mean that 1 or 2 gold is a small amount. People who play the game normally, without using market surveillance tools like GWSpidey or spend hours buying or selling often do not have more than a few gold total on their account. Friends of mine do not have that much time to play and they have been playing for months and neither of them has more than a few gold.

So you got one ban so far, which was (quickly) taken back after reviewing your account? And here you are, scared like hell, contemplating what might happen, imagining doomsday scenarios of evil customer support employees thinking things like “this account was banned 10 times already, this time I will not take it back”? Oh my.

To me, the story just proves how effective ArenaNet handles cheaters and how reliable they unban innocent people after a review, and how paranoid some players are concerning bans.

Claiming I’m a gold seller or not is a strawman argument. With as much information as we know ANET has access to, there is nothing I’ve done or can do that a gold seller couldn’t also do. However, why does ANET have to ban for sending gold at all? Is that really the only way to screen for gold sellers? Why is that system in place, when there are so many legitimate reasons for sending gold to each other?

To this discussion, I’m providing one legitimate reason for sending gold to other people. Other people are providing more examples of how any player might do it. That means proving that a gold seller is able to do everything I’ve done has no relation to this topic

some of the players are abusing the system by making armor etc too expensive which changes the pricing on everything down the line.

Er, if someone is buying these armors keeping the armor at the higher price, then it is precisely not too expensive. Supply/Demand

Having fixed TP prices would destroy the economy and ruin a lot of good things about the game. Doing step 1 without having fixed TP prices would be pointless.

-1

I like how in a PvP match I can force them to use up the full animation of a sword swing to miss because I backed away. They can also use miss a full sword swing coming in too early. I can also get a good sword swing by starting slightly early.

This might work only if it were applied to ranged attacks, but projectiles have speed. What would do the calculations? What I wanted to shoot an orb of light (guardian staff 2) at an enemy 1500 range away, because the enemy was coming right at me?

Do elementalist first if you’re planning to be a good player, as elementalist benefits the most from excellent play style while getting destroyed the hardest by less-than-perfect play styles.

RoChan.1926:

I would suggest that the two of you still appeal your bans more than likely the moderation team will look and see what you’ve done overturning the decision.

I would like to make it clear that neither of us are banned currently and this is not a plea for help to get unbanned. There is no reason to delete this thread based on “support tickets should not go in general forums” or anything.

RoChan.1926:

What can you suggest as someone who wants to give to the community that can achieve your goal and help to lower gold seller circumvention?

Perhaps something like the cash shop party box where you can place a box on the ground for your event/giveaway that would allow players to get a random bit of gold/items that you directly purchase with gold through a NPC?

Allow for more organized events/guilds to submit a sort of form to the moderation team citing the dates/times/guild/event so that they can flag those mails (even maybe wave the mail suppression) for that certain time?

I think perhaps you and your friend would be the best form of input to Anet at the moment regarding the best way to handle events/giveaways. I would suggest that you advise them of any ideas that they could perhaps implement. I don’t think they ever intended to stifle community participation, but that it’s an unfortunate side effect due to circumstance.

I would love to help ANET figure out a solution, but the only way I could do that is if they brought me and showed me how their current system works and what information they have access to. As is, all I can do is say that banning for sending gold through mail is not working, and they need something else.

Olfinbedwere.5049:

The price of keeping gold spam down is that occasionally someone that isn’t selling gold gets banned for a couple days until it’s sorted out. In my opinion that’s not too high a price to pay if one in a thousand is innocent and it gets fixed.

Right, that’s fine. But what if we both just keep doing it?

I think there are 3 options of what will happen:

1. The cycle repeats. Banned -> appeal -> 2 days later, unbanned -> hand out more gold -> banned. I get to play every 3 days.

2. The cycle stops, negatively. A mod sees “you’ve been banned for 10 times for gold selling. This time you get no appeal, and you’ll stay permabanned” and then it’s done.

3. The cycle stops, positively. ANET puts a flag of “this guy’s legit” on us and we’re never troubled again. The problem with this, however, is that if word gets out then the gold sellers will just first be kind to everyone, then sell gold.

I just don’t know which one ANET would do, and the lack of communication means it’s anyone’s guess

Masaki.2153:

Giving you the benefit of the doubt and the two of you are not exploiters.

We share market ideas together, and try to be extremely aware of the connections. This has resulted in a good amount of money. Honestly, I can share with you exactly how I get the gold I do, but PM me. That isn’t the topic

Czinczar.3786:

Give items instead of gold.

So I’m expected to lose 15% of what I send because I’m afraid of the company?

My friend and I have been successfully trading the TP for decent profits, and we have been getting bored with the game even as we get more involved with the community, so we’ve decided to help out. We like to hold silly, dumb contests in level 1-15 zones with rules that are in everyone’s favor. Rules like

“Anyone want a free gold?”

“Pick a number between 1-2. If you guess right, you get a gold. Limit 2 tries per character”

“Come to [waypoint] and dance and you get a gold”

“Come to [waypoint] and race everyone else on my mark. Winner gets 2 gold, 1 gold for participating”

etc. etc.

It’s a way to remind ourselves of how much we make and how much different that is from what others make, especially in the early levels.

However, he got banned for “selling gold”. The likely cause was that ANET watches if you send a lot of gold through the mail. There have been cases of guilds funding a leader to get commander, and everyone gets banned for sending too much gold in the mail. It was a perma-ban, which he appealed and got unbanned for in two days, but he got no response whatsoever back. If ANET had told him “Oh sorry we’ll be more careful not to ban for kindness in the future” this wouldn’t be an issue.

However, no response at all means that a very real possibility is for a moderator to see “prior ban for selling gold”, ignore why, and assume my friend is a repeat offender because he’s “selling gold again”, and my friend will be denied the appeal and lose everything.

This is really lame, and I don’t know what to do. We’re just trying to have fun in our own way.

What can we do?

Tokens can’t be mass exploited. You’re talking 2 months for 250 ectos, which is an extremely low rate, especially compared to the exploit difference.

The exploit was because you got the jewel back when you salvaged the snowflake jewelry. 17s cost for the 14s jewel + .9 ecto was the salvage recipe, which was ridiculous, immediate profits.

Ninth Requiem.3250:

Ulion.5476:

The only flaw with converting silk to gossamer is that you need skill points to do so. This means if you are planing on creating a legendary you should not do this. You need ~400skill points not including the failed mystic clover attempts.

There’s another flaw with the conversion : it doesn’t work when everyone does it; silk prices rise, gossamer prices fall.

Silk supply heavily outweighs gossamer supply. The only thing this will do is lower gossamer price

Yea you have to do that recipe manually. The reason is because it came out as only needing one exquisite, but that was completely kitten if they wanted to keep commendations in the game (3 exotic trinkets → commendations → 7 black lion keys). Normally the cheapest trinket is Candy Corn Ori Amulet, for 2g. With this, they were worth 60s. So ANET put a pause on the recipe, fixed it, removed the pause, but gw2spidy has not updated the recipe to reflect this. They are all going for about -40s profit (their crafting rate is close to their sell rate), so don’t bother making them.

Two legitimate, intended reasons to put items up for ridiculous prices:

Sometimes people say “buy 250” without looking at the price of what 250 costs or how far down in the supply it hits. When that happens, a ridiculously overpriced sell order has the potential to be filled.

Sometimes there are bots who auto-buy things without intelligent consideration for the price. I know I’ve seen an extremely common crafting item that’s never deviated from 10c-20c shoot up to actually selling for 2g because a bot was mindlessly spending it’s money.

Buttercup.5871:

Very simple. All armors require the same set of materials to craft, except for one component. When that component becomes cheaper, so will the armor. It has nothing to do with how good that armor, in fact, is.

If Anet really wanted good stat combinations to be expensive, then Apothecary armor should be practically free of charge, no? Nope, it’s some of the most expensive armor out there. Why? Karka shells. Why is there such a low supply of karka shells?

You need 1000 of them to make:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ancient_Karka_Shell

And 250 karka shells to make any form of Defensive infusion:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Defensive_infusions

Anet doesn’t “punish” one build or the other. It’s supply and demand, that’s all there is to it.

Apoth, Bers, Carrion, Cleric’s, Explorer’s, Giver’s, Knight’s, Valk. Those are the craftable prefixes. This thread is about an uncraftable prefix, Rabid. Supply and demand of t6 items is not in question here

Charismatic Harm.9683:

You are SO naive if you believe this is the only way to make money.

I do NOT participate in market manipulation.
I have NOT gotten “lucky” on any trades I’ve made.
…..and yet, I am able to make enormous profits on a daily basis.

Currently, with the investments I’ve made, I can make MORE than 100g in profits each day. It wasn’t always like this though. When I started, I was only making about 2g per day, but as I made more money, I had more money to invest. As I had more money to invest, I was making more money.

I’m here, too. Really, I can make 100g+ a day very reliably, and without any form of manipulation.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

One thing item flippers do is that they close the gap between the highest buy order and lowest sell order quicker than if you they didn’t exist. Closing that gap is good for everyone except the flippers. The more money invested in flipping a particular item, the quicker the gap closes and the less profit for everyone.

Exactly this. The market needs flippers to put the buy orders at 85% of the sell orders for every high traffic item. The further away from 85%, the more attractive the market is to people who flip. If everyone does this, it will never be worth it.

If you have an item that sells for 10s and buys for 1s, you know that this is an extremely low traffic item because no one cares about it. If you see 10s and buy orders for 8.5s, the market is working.

Walrus.6390:

Charismatic Harm.9683:

Find something you can GUARANTEE that you can make a good profit on.

Could you give me a hint of where I can start? I’ve got an idea of what kind of tool it is and everything, but I just can’t think of what item, of thousands, would have enought profit margin and liquidity. I’m not exactly asking for your item, just how can I find a similar one?

Figure it out. I made my spreadsheets and put in buy orders for 100 of every item that showed more than 5c profit. I replaced any buy orders that got filled with new ones and replaced the ones that didn’t move with 50, 25 to see if they could get filled. In this way, I learned a few items that were really high traffic and would tend to have profit, like intricate totem or grapes or raspberries.

Schei.7301:

Logun.5360:

Schei.7301:

Logun.5360:

This stuff looks familiar…

Aren’t you the guy who claims to make like 20g on a bad day off the tp?

No, I never claimed to make 20g per day

But you did say that you often flip items with hundreds of gold right?

Is 20g a day that much? I have about 200g capital right now and I made 40g today just trading. I think, had I the capital, I could make 100g+ a day. I think I’ll be there in a week.

As a seller, I love when people undercut further than 1c. It lets me know that that item is no longer profitable to make, so I don’t (reduce supply) while it gets bought up. When its profitable again, I’ll make it.

So the price goes up and down according to the market. That’s awesome. As an example, crafting and then selling exotics sometimes gets me up to 60s profit. I would rather craft the 10 exotics that are worth the 60s and ignore the other 32 that aren’t rather than craft 42 that all say they’re profitable but have a ridiculous supply, so I’d have 5 of them sell before having to relist. As is, I have to relist about 15% of exotics, meaning about 15% get undercut by enough people that it won’t sell for a week.

If everyone kept undercutting by 1c or not undercutting at all (like you suggest), we’d have 100 unsellable things piling up on each other, with tons of people still thinking it’s worth it to try and get in the market so they keep increasing supply. Then if you try to sell anything instead of being maybe 3 or 4 in a market that just became profitable, you’re part of hundreds who are all trying to get their stuff to sell.

That would suck

A lot of your ideas are what I’ve learned myself. It’s a very good guide.

I took it to the next level though.

I’ve followed the tutorial on gw2spidy to get the JSON object according to their API in google spreadsheets. The result is something that looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/1MMPD.png

What makes it different than the spreadsheets you guys are making? For me, every field is filled in with real-time data from gw2spidy, so I can check exact profit margins for all crafting materials, giving me room to spread my investments, which means I’m still hundreds of gold from being able to work all the markets I want to at once. Exponential growth, here we go!