Guild Wars 2

Reality.1025:

Care to explain?

There was some confusion over this, but I believe it has been solved now.

The guy in the screenshot was in our guild, and he just transferred servers. He never mentioned that he was doing it, so we never knew to kick him out of our guild. So there are no hacks going on here – just a guy that transferred from IoJ to DR.

Be assured that he never spied for us. If you notice, we are the guild that is constantly complaining about a potential spy – we wouldn’t have one ourselves.

Most of the confusion was due to a bug where someone can get into an enemy citadel. I’ve documented it and reported it here.

I heard about a bug / exploit that allows you to get into an enemy’s citadel. You can get inside, kill NPCs (not legendary defenders), and can move all the way to the citadel waypoint. After having our guild accused of spying / hacking, I tested this exploit myself and documented it.

There is a hill that you can jump on top of to get past legendary defenders. It is really difficult to do, but I managed to get by walking as far up as I could and using ride the lightening.

From there, you can run around the sides of the citadel, avoiding defenders and possibly kill NPCs on the way, to get all the way to the enemy citadel waypoint.

At this point, it seems to be somewhat public knowledge. While I don’t particularly like posting exploits on the forums for anyone to see, I think added publicity will motivate ANet to fix it sooner rather than later (sorry ANet). It is probably an easy fix – you could just place an extra defender or 2.

Ed Guardian.4825:

It’s funny how this tool for flipping is actually good enough to render flipping near on impossible/impractical in the future… Which is how you know the tool is good.

Thanks for the compliment on the tool . I do have to say, though, that I don’t think any flipping tool will ever make flipping impossible or impractical.

There will always be items that have a >15% differences in price. Some items will become more / less valuable as ANet releases updates for the game, there will be newer trends, and you can always count on people being impatient and using “buy it now” or “sell it now” options (not that there is anything wrong with that).

I’m sure some people speculated that 3rd party TP crawling sites would be the end of flipping

Here is a guide that teaches commanders how to get people to listen to you.

Also, I’ve written part 2 of how to choose items or markets to flip on the TP.

Please let me know what you think

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I have successfully made1g using this program so far! which since I only invested 10g is a nice profit of 10%. Makes it very easy and not very time consuming.

I’m glad to hear that . It does duplicate a lot of functionality from other sites, but the filtering and sorting can keep you from having to eye-ball items when using more specific criteria.

Hehe, no problem RedCobra. I didn’t see it as nasty at all – just something that people probably needed to know. At least now there are a few people vouching for it. Thanks

And I’m a dude Zumy, can’t have children :p

I’m not entirely sure if it works in open office, although I’ve had people tell me that it does work. I’ve never personally tested it.

When you “search” for something, it has to download information from GW2 Spidy. Crafting materials is a category that has the most items. So even on Excel, if I search for crafting materials during a time Spidy has a heavy load, it may take a few seconds. In Excel, there is a message that tells you it is downloading – not sure about Open Office though.

Pandemoniac.4739:

I got around to downloading it (and scanning it!) and it’s pretty darn cool. I may have to lift your code and see if I can put it into The Big Chef Spreadsheet of Foods to get a crafting versus buy cost for my chef.

Yeah man, go ahead.

Sorry the code isn’t cleaner. When I initially made it for myself, I wasn’t thinking of when I would share it. So if you can sort through the semi-spaghetti code, go right ahead

RedCobra.7693:

Beware that excel can contain macros that could be potentially dangerous to your computer.

Regards
Another Tech guy

Yes, excel files can have shady macros in them. I do promise, however, that what I wrote only does 2 things:

• Downloads data from GW2Spidy
• Organizes that data into a table based off of filters

If anyone wants to vouch for it and put some minds at ease, I would appreciate it.

And if you know VBA or VB at all, you can easily take a look at the code (it’s not the cleanest, but there are some comments to give you an idea). It’s not reading or writing anything from the local machine or sending any info to other servers.

I would pick a number of gold you want to keep, and then diversify what you are flipping.

Now that you have much more 4 gold to work with, you can add some other markets or item(s) to flip. So still flip what you’ve been doing (since it is obviously working) but add some other things in because you have more gold now.

I’d rather not say specific markets or item(s) to flip, but I’m done writing the first section of a guide on how to choose markets to flip in. Essentially, one of the things you can do is look at Supply vs Demand – which can give you more information that can cue you on items that are good or bad to flip.

I’ve done quite a few polishes on articles that were previously written, as well as written a few new ones. The best out of the new ones is How to Attack an Enemy Zerg.

It would be good for anyone that plays WvW to read, but especially those that find themselves in leadership positions.

I got some questions about the spreadsheet, and have posted the answers on the site. But since I doubt many of you will look at the website anytime soon, I’ll answer it here also.

If you are confused how the prices are listed out, think of them as in copper only. Here are some examples of how I did the currency:

• 10 = 10 copper
• 100 = 1 silver 00 copper
• 1000 = 10 silver 00 copper
• 10000 = 1 gold 00 silver 00 copper
• 100000 = 10 gold 00 silver 00 copper

So there is a pattern to it. The last 2 digits are always going to be copper. The 2 digits to the left of that will always be silver. Any digits to the left of that will be gold.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me. I haven’t gotten very much feedback on the spreadsheet but have seen almost 1k downloads now. So if you think I could make any improvements (that wouldn’t be an entire overhaul) I might be able to do it for you.

Good luck wrecking (equalizing) theTP

As a side note, I’m really not trying to bump this repeatedly to the top. If anyone thinks I’m overstepping myself on this subforum let me know or move it over to linksville.

In my experience, whenever there are a decent amount of people on you will almost always get a zerg. There have only rarely been times where we’ve gotten skill-lag though.

On my world, I don’t think we have guilds dedicated to doing this, but some of our commanders will request it.

For instance, if I noticed that we had a group of semi-experienced WvW players that understand the whole grand scheme of things, I would ask them to pick a leader and form a group. I would then ask them to pretty much do whatever they want (flip camps, contest POIs, scout, etc). The purpose for them is to harass, delay, and misdirect our enemies while the main zerg does the heavy-lifting.

I’m not sure if that answers your question at all, but good luck to you and your guild.

Luvpie.8350:

Also next time stop after 2nd ballista doesn’t show don’t need to test it 20 times lol.

Hehe, I’ll keep that in mind next time. After 6 hours of commanding, I don’t think my brain was working correctly at that point.

DevonCarver.5370:

I agree. I’ll see what I can do about it. No promises as it may be more complicated than it should be.

Thanks

Yerffejy.6538:

I know I have had this happen to me quite a few times. I believe I also reported it..

Little surprised if you didn’t know this was happening.

Well, I knew that siege couldn’t be placed on some walls – but I wasn’t sure what walls they were. And I definitely had no idea that it ate the BPs in the process.

Dang, that really sucks. I knew that siege couldn’t be placed on some walls, but had no idea that it consumed BPs in the process. Thanks.

Still seems pretty dumb that it will fail AND consume it. That would be a bug in my book.

Alright, so our group got through the outer-walls of SM. We decided to get up on the outer-walls and build some ballistae to counter some of their siege.

Every single time I tried to drop a ballista, nothing happened. I tried about 20 different times in various places, and still it wasn’t working. I then checked my inventory and saw that every time that I failed, I was also consuming ballista blueprints. I went from 40 something to 20.

So is there a particular reason I couldn’t drop ballistas? I stopped trying to get them on the edge after the first 3 times, and tried putting them directly in the center of the wall. And why would I be consuming my BP’s if nothing actually dropped?

I’ve added a few more articles, but here are what I think are the best:

• Power Leveling with Crafting
• A WvW Guide to Strike Teams

Sometime pretty soon, I’ll be adding a spreadsheet that dynamically tells you what items to salvage on the TP for gold. I expect that will be pretty popular, like the other spreadsheet I made for people that like to flip on the TP. So I’ll post on here as soon as I get it up and working.

By the way, in other threads I’ve mentioned a spreadsheet that I’ve made that helps you flip stuff on the TP.

There were some problems with it, and it wasn’t working for several people. I’ve addressed the issue and it should be working now. So if you are having problems, try downloading it again.

Yeah, I just figured out that it had a problem. For some reason, it only worked on half of the computers that it ran on.

I’ve fixed the bug, it should work correctly now.

Also, it does have code behind it, so when you open it Excel will complain at you. You just have to click the button to enable the content behind (I promise no viruses or anything – just downloading junk from GW2 Spidy).

Hi everyone, I thought I would introduce my blog GW2 Guides & Tips. I’ll be writing guides and tips about everything, but I’ll be focusing more on what I enjoy most in the game: Making Gold and World vs. World.

After looking at many other blogs and resources related to the TP and WvW, I found that most of it was out of date or information that was almost directly copied & pasted from other places. One of the main rules I’ve set for myself is to not do a bunch of articles that just comment on other resources. So almost everything you read will be an original take on the game.

I started the blog last week, but have already written a good number of guides and tips:

Making Gold

• How to flip items on the TP
• How to choose markets to flip
• A tool that has advanced searching / filtering of the TP
• Salvaging statistics that you can use to turn a profit

World vs World

• A WvW quickstart guide
• A guide on portal bombing
• The number one tip for WvW strategy
• The use of rallying in WvW to stay alive
• The do’s and do not’s of running in a zerg

General Guides & Tips

• Getting exotic gear at lvl 80 for 0 gold
• What gear to use while leveling up

I won’t be listing out everything that I write, but will post in this thread every now and then when there are several added. I hope you all enjoy what I write, and use it to get an edge over the other thousands of GW2 gamers

I’ve made an Excel spreadsheet that pulls TP listings from GW2 Spidy. What it does is search the TP with more functionality than any other 3rd party that I’ve seen thus far.

In addition to the same basic features, it has:

• A calculated field for Profit as a percentage of Cost
• Searching with ranges (masterwork to exotic, bid price of 25c to 1g, etc.)
• Uses advanced filters that can filter on just about everything
• Sorting on any field
• Hyperlinks to GW2 Spidy for every item

You can download the spreadsheet and its documentation here.

Have fun with it, and let me know what you think

(* Note if you downloaded it on 4/3/13, there was a bug that made it not work on 50% of computers. You should re-download it if you had a problem.)

I’m a little nervous about posting this here instead of linksville, but after seeing how many people downloaded it and contacted me about it after mentioning it in another BLTC thread . . .

Anyway, I’ve made an Excel spreadsheet that pulls TP listings from GW2 Spidy. What it does is search the TP with more functionality than any other 3rd party that I’ve seen thus far.

In addition to the same basic features, it has:

• A calculated field for Profit as a percentage of Cost
• Searching with ranges (masterwork to exotic, bid price of 25c to 1g, etc.)
• Advanced filters that will filter any field(s)
• Sorting on any field
• Hyperlinks to GW2 Spidy for every item

You can download the spreadsheet and its documentation here.

Have fun with it, and let me know what you think

(* Note if you downloaded it on 4/3/13, there was a bug that made it not work on 50% of computers. You should re-download it if you had a problem.)

Charismatic Harm.9683:

I’m not sure if it’s a bug, or an intentional change, but no matter what item you’re looking at, you can only see the lowest 20 prices for that item. No matter how many are listed at how many different prices, you will ONLY see the lowest 20.

It wasn’t in any of the patch notes, nor have I seen a dev comment on it, but this has been brought up in multiple threads.

I wasn’t sure about that. Thanks for confirmation

I haven’t had the problem myself, but you might want to look at this thread.

Once you understand a bit more about flipping items on the TP, you should check out a spreadsheet I posted.

It is just an excel spreadsheet that downloads information from GW2 Spidy and adds some functionality (profit % instead of flat profit, advanced searching and sorting, etc). I also wrote up some documentation on how to use it.

Good luck learning the TP

Undercutting is kind of hit-and-miss. My guideline would be to only undercut if you see a huge clump of items waiting to be sold at the current price, or if there is a very, very small amount of items listed.

So if I wanted to sell cotton scraps and the current listings were at 80s with 2k listed, I would undercut to 79 because the price might drop and I’d be waiting for a few weeks. Also, if I wanted to sell an exotic item that only had 10 of them listed, I would undercut.

You should really only undercut 1 copper, unless you think the price for that item is super-inflated and that nobody would buy it.

Still though, can you not foresee it being a problem when 25% of GW2 players have commander tags?

I do agree with what you’re saying for the present. Right now it is manageable because not that many people have commander tags, and the ones that do actually play WvW and are willing to communicate and compromise with others.

But, when I’m looking a year or so ahead, I see it being a problem when we have 25-50 commanders on a map. That in itself could be a problem, but we will also be getting troll-ish commanders on top of that. What happens when we have 50 commanders and 10 of them are little brats? Confusion and a lack of unification, as well as people arguing back and forth in map or team chat

It’s pretty easy. You just want to bid on items, and then sell them at a higher price. You do have to take into account the 15% fee when selling it though.

Just go over to http://guildwarstrade.com or http://gw2spidy.com and look for the margin (spread on GWT). That is the expected profit you would make if you bought an item at the current bid price, and then sold it at the current sale price.

The biggest drawback to it is time, though. When you flip stuff, it could take months before it sells. So if you have a small amount of gold to start with, you want to try to pick the high-volume items that have relatively stable prices with a semi-good profit.

Yeah, I made a spreadsheet for it too

While I did the calculations a little differently, I still came out with similar results.

MrKnieves.4162:

Maybe you need to listen to all the commanders? Having several on a map works beautifully when they are communicating and working together. Is one is being difficult then /ignore him, is not that hard.

You’re right – it isn’t hard for you or I to pick a commander at the moment. That’s partially because we know WvW and can tell a good commander from a really bad one. Newer players, though, are going to have a much harder time trying to figure out what to do and who to listen to – especially when the map is cluttered with commander icons.

I’m just saying that the longer this game is out, more and more people are going to get their commander tags. You are going to eventually get troll commanders that start screaming to not listen to commander X, Y, and Z because “they are nubs”. Those commanders will then build rams out in an open field.

While I don’t think it is a huge problem right now, the chance of it really messing up WvW increases the longer that GW2 is out.

I’m hoping that eventually we’ll get a mechanic that limits the number of commanders icons that can be on the map. Say for instance, you can only have a maximum of 10 commander icons on the map, and those commanders are the ones with the highest WXP. That’s just tossing an idea around, but you get the idea. Having color coded commanders may be another way of doing it.

Taobella.6597:

I think it would be cool if Commander tag color changed depending on your rank

I don’t know how it should be done, but there definitely needs to be something to help players choose what commander to listen to.

In time, we are going to have a ridiculous amount of commanders on every map. The good ones will keep their tag off because they don’t want to further confuse pugs, but the bad ones will not care and keep theirs on all of the time.

It is definitely going to be a problem once more and more TP warriors get their commander tag.

I can see your point, but I think it would cause something that would be even more annoying.

People that are new to WvW have short attention spans :\ . As soon as they realize there is nothing to do but stand and wait, they’ll be running off to another section of the map or chasing / wiping.

While it is annoying when people PvD when you don’t want them to, it would be even worse if half your group splits off. Personally, I prefer the people with me attack the door than run off. But then again, I usually don’t have that many people with me to begin with.

Tornado isn’t the most useful of skills, but you have to admit that it works better in WvW than just about anywhere else.

Aside from using it to knock people off cliffs and bridges, it works pretty well if your goal is to cause some confusion. For example, you could use it with a portal bomb for some additional chaos.

You shouldn’t be using it for the damage, but rather the knockdown and blinding effects. If you place yourself well, you can CC an enemy group enough and provide better chances for your group as a whole.

Yes, you will probably get downed when you use tornado, but sometimes it is worth it. And even if you get downed, you can often still pop mistform and get away from the group.

Rising Dusk.2408:

You pay a 5% listing fee and then there is a 10% sales tax applied to all transactions on the TP. It’s a gold sink to remove gold from the economy.

^^

It’s a good thing to have a gold sink directly tied to the TP. Check out the D3 auction house to see what it is like without one (huge inflation and very unstable). What would be unfair is if your fortune of 1k gold turned out to be a pittance in a week.

Aralon.7501:

The TP never cut of listings before the update. Before the update I could see listings all the way up to 1g for 1 grape. They didn’t put this change in the notes.

Like I said, I can’t be 100% certain about it. Logically, it just seems to me to be a waste of bandwidth to show every single item when realistically, nobody is going to buy 10,000 of an item. Even if they did start making a huge dent in it, it would just reload all of the data when you searched for it again.

This game isn’t a paid subscription, so ANet has to cut some corners somewhere. And uploading the entire front-end of the database to someone every time they do an unfiltered search sounds like a huge waste of bandwidth.

Is there a particular reason you want to see every single posting of an item? I really doubt you will be buying 20k of any one item. I ask because unless you want to buy something in massive quantities, there would be no reason that you need 100% accurate listings.

Even when spidy is telling you the supply and demand, the actual numbers don’t matter as much as the ratio between the 2. If it shows a supply of 50k and a demand of 200k, I would view it the same way as an item that says 40k and 160k. Both are the same ratio and both show that it is a really high-volume item.

I currently have 75g, but recently had 200+ gold. I spent it on a commander tag and some cosmetics.

My main methods for getting gold are:

• Converting items on the TP (salvaging, mystic forge, etc.)
• Crafting
• Flipping items that other people usually don’t
• Normal PvE stuff

I usually just do some things on the TP when I first login, and then go play. Whenever I’m about to be done, I gather everything I bought and convert it / repost it. The point is to not babysit the TP – checking it every 15 minutes is a waste of time. You can earn quite a bit just by playing the game normally.

Yeah, you can only buy stuff in a max of 250. So if you wanted to buy 16,259 of something, you would have to do a transaction on the same item 66 times.

And also, Spidy may or my not be right in this case. I can’t tell you 100% for sure, but I think the GW2 TP cuts off listings at a certain amount. So while there are 10,000+ items on there, you will only be shown the first 1,000 or so listings by price.

I’m pretty certain, though, that either Spidy or the TP or both are cutting corners somewhere. It wouldn’t make sense for the TP to push out ALL of the listings of an item – it would just take unneeded bandwidth. More likely, the TP says how many items are “listed” in total, but then only shows you the first few thousand.

Spidy’s database comes directly from the TP. If you are thinking there is a problem with spidy, you should be able to cross-reference Spidy’s info with GuildWarsTrade and any other 3rd party crawler. For most people though, just having the correct prices and profits is enough.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying but you should know that GW2 Spidy doesn’t have real-time information. The popular items are cached more frequently, and the less popular items may not be updated for 15 minutes to an hour.

You will definitely notice differences between the official trading post and any other 3rd party website. The only one that is real-time is Zicore’s Trading Post Notifier, and only because it directly connects to your gaming session.

For the things on GW2 Spidy:

• Name – the name of the item
• Level – the required level you need to be to use it
• Rarity – the rarity of the item (look at gw2wiki if you’re confused here)
• Type – the type of item (armor, weapons, trinkets, etc.)
• Subtype – the subtype of the item (coat, spear, ring, etc.)
• Min Sale Offer – The minimum price someone has posted it for. If you undercut someone it will be listed as the minimum sale offer. This is what you normally see when searching for stuff in the TP.
• Max Buy Offer – The maximum price someone has bid on the item for. If you bid on an item at a higher price than anyone else, you now have the max buy offer
• Supply – The number of this item that people are trying to sell on the TP
• Demand – The number of bids on this item
• Margin – The profit you will make if you bid on the item (at the max buy offer) and then sell it (at the min sale offer). This includes the 15% fee for selling something on the TP.

Don’t look for “get rich quick” things on here. There really aren’t any. If you do spend some time to learn the system, however, you can usually make a larger profit than the rest of the GW2 population.

When trying to flip items on the TP, your most valuable resource is time. Since you have only 4g, you don’t want to invest in an item and then let it sit there for a few months before it sells. I would recommend you run some dungeons and build up some gold before you start flipping.

After you have 10+ gold, don’t just look for the biggest “margin” or profit. Look at the ratio of how much it costs to how much you can sell it for. For example, you can buy low level crafting materials for 6 copper and sell them for 15 copper. While it doesn’t sound like much, it adds up quickly when you are getting 212% of what you invest.

You’re kind of gambling by doing this.

First off, master salvage kits cost a lot. And if you are using them up on lower-rarity runes of divinity, the cost per salvage can really knock you out of any sort of profitable range.

Secondly, while it sounds like you have gotten lucky, you recover the runes 80% of the time.

If you do the math on it, you would find out that you won’t be able to sustain much of a profit long-term. You can calculate it out with something like this:

Expected Profit = (Min Sale Price of Rune * 0.85 * 0.8) + (Min Sale Price of Salvaged Mats * 0.85) – (Cost of the item) – (Cost per salvage)

Pull some information from the TP and plug those numbers into this formula. When you start to aggregate it, the margin isn’t going to get you rich quick – especially if you are using master kits on anything except for superior runes (you might get lucky with majors).

—EDIT—

Black lion salvage kits are where you get good profits though. If you use them on lvl 68+ rare or exotic items, you are guaranteed the upgrade component and you have a strong chance to get ectos out of it. At the current gem price it isn’t worth it to buy the salvage kits, though. Just save them whenever you get a stack of them.

Ignore this, accidentally ended up reposting.

Is there some sort of feature or mechanic that clears old TP buy / sell history? I have only been playing for little over a month, but I have not noticed anything like this yet.

I’ve bought over 44,000 items from the TP. As of now, I am very frequently not able to load the page for viewing the items I have purchased, even in odd hours of the night. I can see this being a pretty annoying problem in the future with an even larger transaction history to re-download each time.

Now I have no idea how the TP databases are set up, but it seems to me that if there is not already a mechanic for this, it would be mutually beneficial to implement one. I could clear out item purchases that I don’t care about, thus making it more likely for the page to load, while ANet could save on database space as well as bandwidth each time I have to reload that history.