Guild Wars 2

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Perhaps a mid way point between the suggestion that Behellagh made (16% fee off the backend) and mine (25% fee off the backend). Without any additional fees/tax/penalties, it wouldn’t be fair to the players who do have the money to pay the up front fees.

In fact, you could then consider paying the 5% up front like a discount, should the back end fees go up.

I guess what I don’t understand is….

Why would you want to punish poor players more just because they’re poor?

Selling to a buy order is already somewhat of a punishment in and of itself. You have to take less money if you want to sell it now. It’s the same when selling anything to a buy order. The lower income is punishment enough.

Why have 2 different sets of fees?

Nothing changes if you move the full 15% in fees to the backside of the trade when filling a buy order. 15% of the sale is still being removed from the economy. Players are still making sales. Other players are getting the items they want for less money.

I look at your idea as the reverse of what’s going on in the US economy. People complain constantly that the rich should have to pay more just because they make more money. This is a fundamentally flawed way of thinking. Everyone should pay the same. Rich. Poor. It doesn’t matter.

In this example regarding selling to buy orders in the Guild Wars 2 Trading Post, punishing the poor more than other players doesn’t help anyone. What it would actually do is make fewer people fill buy orders.

As a seller, If I knew I was going to lose even MORE money than the standard 15% just because I’m filling a buy order, why would I, or anyone for that matter, fill a buy order?

Entitlement again.

Its a skin, you won’t die if you don’t have it.

Its a very long term goal.

Wait for the scavenger hunt.

Quit.

In my opinion the way GW2 handles gold sinks is amazing. And I would never complain about it.

100G into runestones to make a legendary is brilliant. Its a big time item you have to create a gold sink. Legendaries also sink tons of mats away. Wp costs are a good idea.

Even better is having to use gold and commendations to buy new ascended earrings. Taking more gold out of the system while rewarding people for spending it is the only reason this game hasnt turned Diablo 3. They have done one hell of a job there. Kudos to John and other Devs. Lets see where it will be a year from now.

More cash drops = big time inflation and a big time no no.

I will be the contrarian.

If you have all the materials, sell them and buy your precursor with the profit. Now, equip it and go back to grinding your mats again.

Why? Because you can get mats all day long, and the sell price is high. As more players have put enough time in to see the possibility of a Legendary, they will likely have their mats, too… And the demand for the precursor will go up.

I am betting against ArenaNet making an “easier” way to get the precursors.. And if they do.. Well… Think about how many complaints there are, in this thread alone, about them taking so long to do anything. How high on that list do you think the Legendary quest is?

I’m going to go out a limb and be an anti conspiracy theorist.. Imagine the developers really love this game, and they don’t want everyone to have Legendary weapons, because they know it will do more damage to the game than any of you ever could. Example: everlasting bell. Imagine LA with every ranger showing off their Dreamer. More like rainbow city!

I just got my Legendary, and I’ve been playing since minute zero. Work for it, you might just appreciate the end result.

The Dreamer sounds more like a robin than a neighing hore.. :P

Because you are new to the TP, to make gold in the trading post first of all you have gain awareness. Start by looking at the trading post trends and expectations. What have low and high demands and how these demands will shift over the time. Obviously there are no 100% certain on these items as they are constrained by ANet’s updates, but that’s how the speculation market works.

Second, you have to realize that big money with nearly no effort is really hard to achieve and the higher the profit, higher the risk. So, don’t start flipping high valued items because you might end up loosing gold!

Third, you have to know how the trading post works. Everything you use costs gold! Sometimes it’s better to sell the items (like the crafting materials) individually rather than transform them into a higher valued item (that will net you lower profit).
Make a profit check on all individual items before transform them with :
Profit = 0.85 * Sell price – Cost(buy orders) to see if it’s worth the work!

Also, time costs gold also. If you are spending one day of work for 10g, than it’s not worth the cost! You can easy make that amount in CoF Speedruns with gold increase consumables and items in way less time!

Trading post real profit is a DO → REPEAT process over and over. Don’t expect to play it once and earn significant amount of gold! Simply you will fail with this logic!

Also, don’t forget Market is global across servers and not server specific. The chances of the item being sold are increadibly higher due to amount of players, cultural differences, etc, etc.

Last of my advice. Don’t put all of the eggs in the same basket! Find 4 or 5 items that you can earn gold instead of only one. If that item supply increases or it’s demand decreases you may lose all your gold!

/Cheers

SilverThorn.5047:

mehyaM.3042:

I like the part where everyone seems to be missing the increase in supply which results into a lower price. Good times.

i know that drop rate has considerably increased and i am quiet pleased. 25s isnt a bad deal considering it came from a rare worth 1s… however, why would someone put up a small bunch priced @ 24.73s when there was already a highest offer of 25s for 80 pieces?

What i am trying to create here is awareness…. especially for the newbies who just assume the market price from the lowest seller.

Let me tell you why that happens:
First there seem to be a lot of players who sell ectos at buy order price (instant selling).

Now lets say current highest buy order is 20 ectos for 25s and some farmer wants to instantly sell his ecto production of the day (lets say 30 ectos). He uses the option “match highest buyer” and puts in his stack of 30 ectos, 20 of those will be sold instantly to whoever posted that buy order but the other 10 will be put in as an offer for 25s.

If you watch closely you will notice that those unreasonably low offers are at the same price the buy order was just a few moments ago and since there are a lot of people instant selling you see this happen quite often.

But none of this matters. Can someone please explain to me how this “manipulation” leads to profits? No profits = no motivation to do it = no one will do it in such a large scale.

The rich, the poor and speculation by evil capitalists. GuildWars2 has it all. The entire debate about legendaries is somewhat funny, because it illustrates how narrow-minded most people are. First of all, legendary weapons are the prime example for Conspicuous Consumption (insert wikipedia link here!). Now we come to the funny part: everyone that demands to make legendaries easier to obtain forgets, why these items are so precious and valuable to players in the first place. Removing the difficulty removes the legendary status. In the end most complaints boil down to envy “others have it, but I don’t!”.

Speculation doesn’t increase prices, especially in such market as the BLTC with its thousands of players. Speculation is even good, because it helps the market the move to the equilibrium. Further “playing the market” is costly as well: time and knowledge to gather information and to execute all the transactions. Not to mention the risks involved with any speculation and the high transaction fee on top of it.

I think that, after a great deal of reading posts on this forum, I have reached an inevitable conclusion: ANet is seeking to tax the living daylights out of us on the Trading Post. And they must be stopped.

See, the 15% tax on the Trading Post is a absolutely meaningless, worthless device. I mean, what does it do? Imagine this: what if you had a hundred ectos, just sitting in your bank, and, suddenly, ANet decided to get rid of the tax? Imagine how much the price of ectos would skyrocket! Everybody would have so much extra money that they suppliers would be able to afford to make their prices higher. You could suddenly be selling off your ectos for over 100G! And without tax, too!

(Psst, little hint: make sure to empty your bank accounts and your pockets before you do that! Buy as many ectos and other mats as possible.)

Imagine where that tax money is going, too. Straight into the pockets of ANet’s employees, I bet! I bet John Smith has hundreds of millions of gold just sitting in his bank account, and he’s laughing his kitten off at us at the mere idea of us scrambling to get legendaries! I mean- right?!

And what about drop rates? I mean, why can’t the Inquest drop, like, 1G? Or Sparkflies, or other easy enemies, like mosquitos, bandits, and elementalists? Imagine all of the money that we would have to spend on the Trading Post!

We should all meet in Lion’s Arch and destroy the Trading Post headquarters.
Next Monday. Be there.

(This is obviously complete satire. If you’re reading this and you’re one of the people opposing the TP tax, let me put it to you this way: even if you sold all of your ectos for 1G each, by the time you picked it up from the TP and were able to spend it again, the price of individual ectos would have increased tenfold, and your money would be virtually worthless due to the fact that everybody had so much money that they would have to raise prices on all of the things in the economy to make up for the massive amount of money, and the continuously increasing supply of money. That’s hyperinflation for you guys. c; so be glad that there’s a TP tax, because it’s hugely important in reducing inflation.)

This whole discussion about them ‘cutting costs’ or whatever is unfounded. As a matter of fact, if you check their website, they’re ramping up on employees for different aspects of the game and company. Their development team, who we have no reason to distrust, has also on assorted occasions said that they’re not laying off employees or blatantly cutting costs. Go search the dev tracker if you’re curious.

The reason precursors are so valuable is because they are so rare and because demand is so high. Eventually this will drop off as more are added to the game whenever the precursor scavenger hunt comes to fruition, so if you’re not dead-set on getting your legendary right now, save up and wait.

As a side note, I’d really love for them to do another one-off with a Karka-like chest because that was awesome, but who knows what they’ll actually do.

Well, that was a supply issue and yes I can agree that in the case of an in-balance in supply, they would re-evaluate that. I loot just as many dust as I do anything else so it seems they have fixed that. The distribution of T6 mat drop rate seems overall, equivalent. That’s where I would expect it to be. The balancing being asked for in this thread in this case is focused on addressing a demand problem.

Simply put, I don’t think drop rate should be so haphazardly increased to ensure a quantity that fullfills the complete range of Dust’s uses in-game. The balancing provided by the market does that all on it’s own. I want more Omnoms and Truffles too. That demand doesn’t really justify the addition of putting more ingame, no more than it does for Dust.

The people arguing for ‘fixing’ the speculation obviously have no idea how necessary it is to have competitive (i.e. best price) market. If Anet told us that we couldn’t sell our items for what we think it’s worth, I think many people would just not bother selling anything.

if everyone should be able to play the game the way he wants. Then everyone should have the right to open a dungeon group and picking only the best dps geared players for it, if thats the way HE wants to play this game.

beeing able to play the game the way you want, doesnt mean others have to take you into every dungeon with that attitude, because they can play it how and with whoever they want as well. If someone asks strictly for exotic geared glasscannons and you run a bunkerbuild and ask for an invite, you are nothing more than a liar, just go find another group that accepts you “the way you want to play”, anet has done nothing wrong there, everyone IS able to play the game he wants.

i have nothing against a gearcheck, id even wish for a dps meter, because the way I WANT to play, is always maximizing, optimizing and getting the best out of my character and my build, instead of purely theorycrafting in the forums with haters and whiners (ranger forum, who almost never even take the pet into “dmg calculations” … ).

The Trading Post should be able to deduct funds from the account bank for purchases, and should not require the character who is making the purchases to have the funds on them.

In other words, if I buy something on the TP, the TP should first check to see if I have any money in the bank and then deduct that, and then use the funds on the specific character. It would basically be similar to a debit card. Since the TP can be accessed anywhere, it appears they already have this sort of technology (consortium? asura?) and that this sort of technology would be appropriate.

I mention this because some of us have several alts, but we want to buy gems/phat lootz/minis without having to leave a dungeon or event right in the middle to buy them. Please assist us in impulse shopping

Thanks!

Svarty.8019:

Xynn.2748:

Q:

Maybe it’s just me but with the increased loot drop, I’m afraid globs of ectoplasm are going to start dropping in price what do you guys think?

A: Supply & Demand.

Please proceed to close this thread, thanks.

If you closed every thread that could be explained away with “Supply and demand”, half the forum would be empty.

Let’s speculate:

• I think ectos should be super-cheap because they drop all the time from world bosses now. Supply increased.

• I think ectos should be expensive because they are required in nearly every top-tier recipe. Demand increased.

• I think ectos should be expensive because people are going for more than one Legendary/demi-Legendary weapon now. Demand increased.

• I think ectos should be cheaper because people are giving up on Legendary weapons because of other difficult-to-acquire components. Demand lessened.

We could go on and on. Let’s!

Oh you wanted to discuss the potential policy reasons supporting an increase or decrease in ecto pricing. In that case, your Subject line choice was terrible. You asked “are”, which is a fact based question to which the only answer is “supply and demand.” Apparently you intended to ask “Should….”.

In that case, I believe the proper policy is that high-end gear should be more accessible and that a major hurdle to Legendaries and other weapons should not be the price of a generic crafting material. Thus, I believe ectos should cost less than the 42s that they did before the loot patch. Whether the proper cost is 15s, 20s, 25s, etc. is preference, but I believe that somewhere in that 15s-25s range would be a great blend of making high-end gear still cost something significant (~2-4g for an exotic) yet not flood the market. I base my opinion on pure personal impression since I don’t actively follow the global market for ectos and their derivative products.

Remember, when you see sell price on Spidy, it only is listing the lowest sell price available. It almost always means there’s a bunch of sell listings higher than it. When you say people buy 7 precursors, it doesn’t mean they’re buying all 7 at the lowest sell price. They’re probably buying a bunch that’s much higher in price than the lowest sell price also. Hence why it’s silly to do something like this for profit.

I’m just looking at Spark right now. The lowest sell listing is 575G. But if the 4 lowest Sparks are sold out, the next lowest price that will appear is 645G. So another more plausible explanation for the price increase isn’t any “manipulation” but simply sell orders being bought out faster than it can be replaced.

John Smith.4610:

It’s late so forgive me if I make any mistakes.
That is a very interesting argument. Here are my counter-points (abbreviating to EMH):
1. This is a big one, there are no efficient markets with EMH, the EMH doesn’t really hold up in reality. Ever seen the revenue a good high frequency trader makes, even in the most highly traded markets?

Seconding this. My father has spent >30 years working as an ORMS professor and business consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and rejects almost the entirety of the efficient-market hypothesis due to its premise that people can be rational (optimal) actors.

All of the research and consulting he has done has led him to conclude that not only are people not rational actors on average, but people are overwhelmingly and exceedingly irrational (suboptimal) actors on average – and that the standard deviation on most measures of irrationality across a population is very small (i.e. almost everyone acts irrationally almost all of the time).

John Smith.4610:

My job isn’t necessarily to prevent swings, it’s to know what they will be ahead of time, and make sure the swings will be predictable and understandable.

Are there multiple people in charge of that, or that dedicate a significant amount of their work effort towards it? It seems like a lot to handle for a single individual (and IIRC you have many other responsibilities as well) given the market size and the relative difficulty of predicting human (i.e. usually irrational/sub-optimal, but sometimes brilliant) behavior.

Gold sellers are generally very low paid workers in outside countries. These workers have very few jobs, specifically they focus on one task such as gold farming or monitoring bots.
A different person would do the effort of hacking/phishing/buying accounts with stolen information or in desperate situations from actual revenue. The traditional gold farmer seeks to:

1.Gain gold
2.Sell Gold

1.
a.Gaining gold through players selling for very low amounts, then in turn selling to make profit.
b.Gaining gold through farming, botting, or stolen/stripped accounts.

2.
a.RMT then sells through websites, most of which are simply umbrella companies (fake named sites that all work for 1 real company) each offering a cheaper price than the other.
b.Sells through in game spam, which fortunately is a dead end in GW2 as they lose the account immediately, thus hurting their profit.

Some quick facts about RMT:
The person doing the selling/buying/botting usually gets paid very little to keep costs down. These people usually work in groups in small closed off rooms with many computers and desks etc. Most the time these people are in other countries and sell either-
a.Directly to companies that sell to players.
b.Directly to players via their own site.

Now keeping in mind not all rmt are asian, “bad people”, or evil so to speak. Some may simply be making a small living, but this is besides the point. RMT IS bad, and it IS against the rules of every MMO I can think of.

Arenanet does an amazing job of deleting bots and rmt. I do not log in to RMT spam every single day like some other games I won’t mention.

Now as for the buying gem with the ill gotten gold, imo, this seems false. An RMT is given limited time and are paid for their work. Meaning that if they do not make a good amount of gold they do not get paid, and have limited time to do so. Most likely an RMT will not take a chance on buying gems to inflate/deflate anything. RMT focus on one thing and that is making money as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As for the calling out arenanet on exact numbers, well I can tell you from maybe 12+ years of MMO’s not once have I ever seen a game company give away their tactics on bots/rmt. People like FFXI GM’s would create teams to work on botting/hacking/rmt etc, and they would tell you "X amount of rmt/botters have been banned and X amount of gold has been removed from the system. Beyond that we need not know what goes on. Botting may not be gone, but it certainly is no where near the epic proportions of other games. John Smith has done very well to answer questions in an intelligent and formal manner without simply closing the thread or not caring.

There is a ton of other things to be worked on, there’s a ton of threads that could use the devs,leads,cc’s,cm’s, attention. there are bugs, glitches, imbalances, living story work, development work, all that need attention more than someones wish to understand how security works in someones business. There is a key to understanding security, those on the inside have the tools and know-how, whilst those on the outside know only what they can find or are told. I don’t believe Arenanet is out to get anyone, is hiding things that could hurt the game, or is in any way hindering their own game.

People can continue to bash them, the employees, and their work, but this is all for nothing. if all this thread was is to voice concern then I think it has hit its mark. We all understand it was a bad situation, that RMT are bad and hamper game progression and fluidity, but we cannot call-out these people working on the game every 5 minutes because we want to know exactly how they do every little thing. They aren’t controlling us through some scheme or web of lies. And if I ever had that feeling surely I wouldn’t be here. I spent time under leaders in the military who truly would lie just to hush the concerns of personnel, who would risk lives on hunches or quick plans. What I’m saying is there are bad people out there who are corrupt and look to take advantage of you, of everyone. But this company, this game, is not the rabbit hole and clearly some people have started the drop down the tin foil hat tunnel of illusion.

CassieGold.7460:

Not sure about tracking items, because there’s still a need to match items to sell orders. Incrementing counters makes sense as an approach, but the flip side of managing the orders that pertain to the items that are created / destroyed via this method…. it kind of makes my brain hurt.

I guess it’s not how I would build it, it does have an advantage of database size management, but I think from a process prospective it would complicate other interactions.

Software development is much more of a creative endeavor than most folks think. It would make sense to me to track sell orders without associating them with a particular instance of an item, but we have no idea of the requirements and constraints of the entire system, so it’s all just speculation. It is interesting just as a thought exercise, but maybe we shouldn’t bore the non-developers

CassieGold.7460:

My greater point, without getting sidetracked into implementation, is that it makes little sense for A-net to either produce more goods than occur through game play naturally (injecting goods into the market via the TP) or to buy items out of the TP (having a dummy buyer vacuuming up items.)

Only Dev comment towards this that I can point to is one made several months back when Lindsay was talking about the desire they have for people to huck things into the mystic forge to destroy items…. they don’t need to write code to do such things, they create vehicles for players to choose to do those things for them.

I think we’re in violent agreement here. Remember the temporary forge recipes a while back during the butter boom? I’ve been very impressed with the amount of thought ANet puts into the changes they make to encourage or discourage certain player behaviors. I don’t think a ham fisted direct “take stuff off the market” would be nearly as effective as getting the player base to take care of it.

It’s important to consider the effects of announcements and patches on the game’s economy.

In 10 days from January 17 to January 27, the price increased dramatically (3000c to 3800c). Why?

January 16:

• Announcement that world transfers will end, and the introduction of guesting. Result is transfer en masse, increased focus on WvWvW to ‘boost’ servers (lookin’ at you, Kaineng), reduced focus on PvE.

January 17/18: transcript of Jan. 17 developer interview which announced:

• Removal of rez rushing in dungeons. Players could expect reduced ability to obtain rares/exotics as a result of harder and more time-consuming dungeons.

• General AoE ability nerf. Also reduces drops due to reducing players’ ability to ‘tag’ tons of enemies and become eligible loot from all of them, e.g. from Cursed Shore farm train.

• Misc. comments about rebalancing, increasing dungeon difficulty, adding or improving alternative routes to get gear (presumably that gear would not require Ectos as that route has already been explored extensively).

Dev announcements and patches have a very noticeable impact on TP prices, and the trend that begins when an announcement/patch is made tends to become stable until the next announcement/patch is made.

This isn’t an issue of ‘returning to a previous price’ because the reasons aren’t the same – that it is currently about the same price is not due to a return to past conditions, but the introduction of new conditions that have a similar effect as past conditions did. That’s an important distinction because it shows that the changes they make (and imply) do impact the TP in a significant way.

Also – I’d argue that the pre-Jan. 17 price point was majorly impacted by market oversaturation due to Wintersday events (esp. Snowflake exploit) and that the Feb. price of ~3900c was the ‘real’ value of Ectos prior to the most recent patch that significantly increased Ecto acquisition rates.

Contiguous.1345:

OK, I’ll explain in detail.

This game is a computer program. It’s designed to simulate many aspects of reality. One of those aspects is a ‘market’. Players are presented with the illusion of a trading system and allowed to buy/sell goods apparently to each other.

…

It’s a lot easier and requires far less code, to simply use a set of RNGs to determine the supply of goods and prices. If I were asked to do it I would simply insert dummy trades into the game in order to source/sink goods and keep available the items that players need while quietly removing junk.

The obvious signs of something like that would be for example, the ready sales of scrap items and bags that sell on the market consistently for more than their content value. Again, the fact that exotic armour, weapons and trinkets are always available at prices less than the cost of crafting. (Before someone objects that you get XP ‘profit’ from crafting, I’ll just add that it’s across the board – EVERYTHING you need is available – even if nobody in their right mind would craft it.)

I don’t want to spoil the game of course – but it IS a game. Smoke and mirrors. :-)

PS 20 years a programmer. lol!

Amusing theory, but you’re mistaken and seem to have a poor understanding of market forces. Markets are not rational – people are, on the whole, really ‘dumb’ (irrational and easy to manipulate). I include myself in this statement, though being aware of certain sales tactics does help a person avoid being sucked in by them.

One of the most fundamental mistakes you can make about a market is to assume that its participants are rational beings.

If you put something on sale for 15% off, you’d expect people to be much more interested than if it were on sale for 9.97% off – but whoops, it turns out people take more notice of the 9.97% sale (due to overexposure — desensitization — to a common sale figure like 15%), and you end up both having a better margin and selling more product. And then you try putting some designer clothes on sale for 9.97% – and sales plummet for that item because a fashion-centric mindset despises ‘sale’ items as cheap or out-of-vogue. So you increase the sticker price of those clothes by 15% over the base price and you get more sales than you originally did!

Those are real-world examples, where something of much greater value than virtual gold is exchanged – i.e. physical cash or virtual money paid through a card or check (sidenote, people are generally much less willing to spend money when using cash as opposed to check, and check as opposed to card). If people are irrational with the item of basest value in their life (money), imagine how terrible gamers are with the essentially value-less gold that they have.

When it comes to individuals playing a game, the time-value of money is all but forgotten. Instead of investing in a long sale, players offload their items for below the ‘true’ market value of the item. Instead of putting in a buy order at a much lesser price, players are willing to pay inflated prices to get things now. Instead of being rational and investing their money in slow-but-certain gains, they’ll gamble on containers because they just might get lucky (combine that with my previous point and you have people wanting to gamble right now, leading to containers sometimes selling for more than they’re worth).

So where does all of this irrationality leave us? With no indication whatsoever that there is any TP-gaming code in the game. In fact, with my >10k purchases and >6k sales (according to the log) over just the past three weeks, I’d argue that there is almost definitively no TP-gaming code in the game. You mention that you think ‘needed’ goods will be kept at a reasonable price for players – having intentionally forced hundreds of those ‘needed’ goods from 5% above vendor price to over 600% above vendor price, and kept them that way for weeks while raking in money, I strongly disagree.

Source: 12 years a programmer. lol! It doesn’t matter for this topic.

Real source: father is a very respected ORMS professor and has been a business forecast consultant for Fortune 500 companies (Guidant/Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Best Buy, 3M, IBM, etc.) since before I was born. He’s taught me about forecasting, economics, management, and market forces since before I could walk, no matter how often I told him I wasn’t interested… and he got me interested as a result.

Unspecified.9142:

munkiman.3068:

With a BLSK you’re actually pushing close to 100% return in ectos.

Safe numbers to work with when salvaging rares are:

BLSK = Average of 0.9 ectos per rare.
Master’s Salvage Kit = Average of 0.8 ectos per rare.

Obviously you aren’t going to get Ectos every time but some times you get 2 or 3. These numbers are based off me crafting and salvaging hundreds upon hundreds or rares (mostly gloves, boots, helmets, and shoulders).

Assuming you got those numbers with a relatively large sample size then I guess it is safe to conclude that you should NEVER buy a BLSK.

25 uses * 0.9 ectos per salvage = 22.5 ectos

Cost per salvage of the kit: 300 gems = 5.82g/25 uses = 23s per use

ectos cost about 25s-15% = 21.25s

you are LOSING an average of 1.75s per salvage over just straight up selling the gems plus losing additional money over what you could have been making from just selling the rares.

To put it in perspective:

sell 300 gems = 4.2g
sell 25 rares (ave of 25s ea) = 5.3g

total profit: 9.5g

buy BLSK: -5.82g
salvage for 22.5 ectos and sell for: 4.78g

total profit: -1.03g

so every time you buy a BLSK you are losing 8.5g on what you could of gotten from selling the rares and buying no kit.

Everyone just need to guest on lower pop servers. I guest on ET and I’ve never had an issue with too many people, lag or any of the crazy stuff that people say happens.

Most people will not guest onto high pop servers (Blackgate, which happens to be my home server) for events for this exact reason.

What does that mean?

The issues the server has with full map instances and home world players getting kicked to overflow maps is not likely a result of guesting but rather from more people attending the events who also call that server home.

tldr: guesting is not the problem

I have this problem for a long time.
It seems to be some UI glitch, as when I have this I cant see the page to sell my itens and I cant get the mouse-over tooltip on the itens I want to buy.

Restarting the game always worked for me…
Try it, if doesnt work…

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Anet hasn’t released data on this so it can’t be included in the “facts” list, however, the lag and overflow issue probably has more to do with an overall increase in people from your own server participating in the events and taking space on the server as it does from those guesting. Everyone is up in arms about the situation and just assumes it is from guesting rather than looking at the most obvious and likely source of the issue: a big spike in your home server’s population now participating.

This is a dead horse in the crafting sub forum but I’ll sum up:

There are profit opportunities in every craft, but the market shifts and you have to look for them. (John Smith has mentioned this previously.)

There are methods to source materials that do not rely on the TP which may yield better Return on Investment. Knowing how to source your materials can help you maximize your profit margin.

There are markets with opportunity that require lvl 400 crafting. This is more true of weapons than armor. There are low velocity markets with substantial opportunity in recipes that use Lodestones. How you source your lodestones will have an impact on your profit margins.

I’m sorry if that’s all a bit cryptic, but the honest truth is: There is opportunity in crafting, but it’s not push button profit, you have to do market research to find your opportunity, and the market shifts often enough that there is no ‘go to item’ to make over and over again for profit.

GL and happy crafting!

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

As I said in my Crafted cheaper than mats thread is that an armor piece shouldn’t be cheaper than the mats required to craft that armor, in other games this works fine or even they don’t even exist at the marketplace so you have to craft them.

Why shouldn’t a specific item be less expensive than materials that could be used to create any number of things? My husband just crafted his way from 25 to 75. He sold the things he made to recover some of the costs of buying the materials, but he didn’t care if he made a profit on items because he had already gotten some value out of them from the XP he gained by creating them.

GW2’s crafting has significant differences from crafting in other games. Everyone can gather crafting materials and lots of materials are gathered just by regular play. Everyone can do all of the crafts. Crafting and gathering gives a significant amount of XP, and is part of the dailies.

When you craft something in GW2, you don’t add much value to the materials you crafted it from. In some ways you actually make the materials less valuable, because you turn them into a specific item that appeals to fewer people than all the possible items that could be made from them, and they can’t be used to level up any more. It just isn’t that difficult to make the items for yourself, so most of the profit comes from providing convenience.

I’ve had better luck selling insignia and inscriptions than selling items made from them. A single insignia can be made into 18 different things (6 pieces of light, medium, or heavy armor) and I know a lot of folks that buy materials to give to their guild mates to get something specific crafted. The market is larger than it would be for say medium shoulders crafted from that insignia.

I do still trust ArenaNet, and the various devs that represent them. Granted, that may be because of a pseudo-personal relationship built up over years of pre-launch marketing which made me feel involved and encouraged me to see them in the best light… but I don’t think it’s just that.

For me, the key is that ArenaNet are working for the long term here. They’ve had a game running for seven years and more, they’re planning for GW2 to last as long. For that to happen with GW2’s more dynamic style, there needs to be groundwork laid and seeds planted – this means story openings, but also stuff like ascended gear will (I feel) fit into a long range plan. Right in the here and now, it may not seem to make sense, but we’ve already seen things gradually slot into place as they develop other areas to support it.

I think they’ve got things they’re aiming for, and I don’t think they’re lying about those aims. Whether or not they’re going about it in the best way is always debatable, but I do think they have a plan and I do trust that this won’t just dissolve into another every-other-MMO. If nothing else, I don’t think that would actually benefit them at all, and I think they know that.

When you have a company developing new content on a monthly basis, new stuff will have bugs – that’s inevitable, I think. It’s a big game. A little tolerance of their working conditions would be kind. I’m planning on sticking around for the long term personally, and I have some faith that in a year’s time I’ll be able to look back at older additions to the game and see where they were going with it all.