Guild Wars 2

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

lisamee.2408:

But you can slowly make gold by selling the ingredients for crafting, because many people craft to gain levels to 80. And since the drop rate is so low, i only see the prices going up for ingredients.

But I want to gain money while crafting !!

This is like wanting to make a salary when you’re in college. I mean, why should someone go to school for all those years and not make money while they’re doing it?

Crafting can be very profitable.

Would someone buy 60g worth of thread if it wasn’t?

Oh John, you’ve mentioned rent seeking which is a great topic for discussion (and incredibly anti free-market).

Now that you brought it up, a group of us sinister market manipulators would like to suggest the idea of Trading Post fee caps.

Is it really fair that those of us who sell several legendary weapons per week have to bear such large fees while trying to serve the nouveau riche community of Tyrian trust fund kids?

Surely we could put in a good word to your superiors in exchange for certain… considerations?

Think it over…

The core issue is – as with any bidding situation – not to let your competitive instincts supplant your fiscal sensibilities.

Ultimately, you placed the order, someone filled the order and the deal is done.

You might want to edit that just a bit to remove the link…

I buy 40 master kits at a time and as I said, the average yield from level 80 rares is about 91% but each batch of 125 can see a lot of variation.

Some people have asked if the lower tier kits give the same yield – I just do not know and it could end up being very expensive to truly find out (2000+ salvages) so I stick with the master kits.

You will get bad streaks of 5-10 salvages with no ecto and it seems every other day there is someone posting a “did they just nerf the ecto salvage!?” thread on various forums.

The Devs have confirmed that DR does not affect salvage as well.

The fractal bags seem to do this – I got one of each tier but I think the main problem is that if you don’t have enough slots and your bags fill up, your weapons just end up in whatever open slot is available.

I put my last 3 bags as the Green, Yellow and Orange based Fractal bags and my exotics stay in the right place and rare drops are easier to find.

Considering you could do this with a silly holiday hat in Guild Wars 1, it does not seem like too much to ask.

The basic idea is to create a skin library that is disconnected from item stats.

It sounds fun, but it would actually make legendary weapons even more common which I don’t think is the best idea.

Most people who are rich enough to buy a legendary with cash shop gold probably have enough sense not to do it.

I’m fascinated by this weird blue collar gaming ethos that if your pretend person has “soft hands” and earned their money some way other than fighting, that it’s some how illegitimate.

Ditch digging is honorable work, but but it’s not know to get you the finer things in life.

It seemed overwhelming when I started, but I started by making a single clover.

Honestly, I would try to get the mystic clovers out of the way as soon as possible because they can be very frustrating.

I ended up doing my Juggernaut backwards compared to most people – I have all the buyable material I need (except the last 11 clovers) and I’m down to just doing the “play” aspects of map completion, badges, karma and the shard.

It’s kind of nice because I don’t have to worry about the market and I spent weeks grinding money and now I just get to play so if you can do it that way, it’s not bad…

The other think I would add is to decide how you play to get your precursor – either through forges or through the TP. Personally, I forged about 200 hammers and decided I was going to go crazy if I kept it up – so I bought it.

Chuo.4238:

Charismatic Harm.9683:

The only way I could see ArenaNet implementing direct trade is if it was a barter system ONLY.

No gold can be transferred during a trade. It could only be item(s) for item(s).

I could happily live with this. When the ele gets a greatsword drop, and the warrior gets a wand, it’d be nice if they could just trade.

Charismatic Harm.9683:

If you thought the message spamming in GW1 was horrible, a direct trade system, even if it was barter only, would be SO much worse.

Didn’t think the message spamming was a problem at all in GW1. Did you notice that you could open your Party menu and look at the Trade window to see what was out there?

At any rate, Map Chat is full of various kinds of spams and juvenile crap as it is. I mostly keep it turned off, anyway. Of course, if a Trade chat were implemented….

The WTS chat would frequently spill over into the main chat channel because anyone selling something is never going to be content to wait for customers and will solicit them through any available mechanism.

I think in the later years, Anet enforced some chat discipline, but in the first few years, it was very chaotic and spammy.

I salvage in lots of 1000-2000 at a time. I can salvage 125 items in about 3-4 minutes and I purposefully do not look at the results until I’m finished so if I had decided to try it, a single “action” would have put me well into ban territory without any premeditation or intent or realization of what happened.

Olba.5376:

twwizzie.3842:

Hi,

I was wondering about the Tax we pay on the Trading post.

What happends with it?
Is it just to take it out the game?

And why if i place an item i have to pay ..

And if someone made and offer and i “agree to” sell it… i have to pay also.

I think this is kinda stupid.

The tax is a gold sink, so the funds you put in are taken out of the game.

The reason you have to pay at all times is simple:

1. When you’re selling, you pay so that you won’t be able to use the TP as a storage by placing your stuff at the maximum allowed price
2. When you’re buying, you pay so that you won’t be able to keep undercutting without consequences
3. When you’re filling an order, you’re simply putting in a buy order at the price matching the lowest sell price, so the fee is still in place. The reason here is that if you did not get charged the fee, it would pretty much always be cheaper to sell to the lowest buyer than placing it on sale yourself

And the gold sink is working kitten well. Just take a look at most costly items on the TP. Discounting the legendaries, which don’t have an arbitrary value, everything is less than 1000 Gold. For purposes of playing the game, Copper is the low level currency, Silver is the mundane currency and Gold is the investment currency.

I think you meant to say “When you’re selling” for point #2. Buyers don’t pay a fee to the TP to use it.

The Mystic kits require 3 stones from the cash shop and their main advantage is that they save space and time (250 uses vs 15 or 25)

The BL kits guarantee you keep an upgrade such as an expensive sigil or rune, beyond that, they are not worth the gold/gems for general salvage use in my opinion.

If you just want to break down a bunch of white/blue items, then the lower level kits should be fine, but I’m sure some people have done the math on the uses vs recovery rates, etc.

For rare items, I experience an 87-94% ecto recovery rate in lots of 1000 using the masters kits.

LFk.1408:

I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’d support it.

I listed that as kind of the minimum requirement to keep some of the benefits of TP in place.

There’s all sorts of ways to poke holes in my suggestion. For example, if Gold and Gold only is taxed, players would just create some kind of “chip” currency. If you ever played GW1, you’d be familiar with ectoplasms as currency. While that particular currency was created out of necessity, as a player could only hold so much gold, it could be revived in GW2 as a way of dodging trade taxes. There’s just no way to tax 15% of an item.

Simply put, there’s a unique combination of benefits right now that the no-trade, all-TP format provides that will be broken with any sort of trade implementation. The current system the game is under is simple, elegant, and conducive to spending more time playing and less time crawling forums and user-created sites. You can post an item and forget about it, if you wish, knowing that it will take care of being sold on its own. This would be completely undermined if user trading gave any sort of advantage.

Utilization of a direct user-user trade system would certainly steer a large percentage of buyers away from the TP, and to the private market. From a user perspective, it would cause more hassle. You can’t beat the private market prices – the only way is to join it, meaning more time spent meeting up with buyers face to face, more time manually executing trades, and less time available to play the game and also still sell everything you want. Maybe this is just the viewpoint of me, personally, as I am a very heavily market-oriented player.

No implementation of trade system is one I support, but if ANet ever does become adamant about making one, I’d want it strongly taxed.

They are not going to implement a secure P2P trading platform – ever. Of course I don’t speak for them, but there are tons of things they are working on putting into the game and this feature simply does not fit into their business model.

P2P trading is inherently insecure on purpose because encouraging that sort of trade has a lot of negatives.

Also, the TP fees are “fees”, not taxes and implementing a “tax” on Player to Player transactions would be a nightmare and serve no purpose.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

van.5367:

The criteria for ‘knowing’ it was wrong was only the amount of salvages you do. As a player who does 100+ rare salvages a day as a way to make money it seems like this is one of the worst ways to suggest a player is knowingly taking advantage of an exploit.

No. They didn’t get banned for any specific step in the cycle. They got banned for repeatedly running the entire ecto generating cycle.

So you can simply avoid being banned for this by never using any of the output of a salvage to produce the item you just salvaged.

People who craft rare items to gamble at salvaging them for ecto will end up with both ecto and a small amount of the original materials used to make the rare item.

Are you advocating that those who roll roll their fabric or metal scraps back into another batch are “exploiting”?

Chuo.4238:

Market manipulators…

I wouldn’t care if I wasn’t forced to use the TP to trade with people. In any other game, I can directly trade and not have to deal with such manipulators. But in GW2, not being able to directly trade forces everyone to use market value on items, which makes it very enticing for people to try and manipulate the market.

But if I want to sell you an item for some price other than what’s on the TP, I’ve either got to trust that you’ll mail me the funds when I mail you the item, or put it on the TP and hope you’re the one who gets to it first, and not one of the manipulators.

Moreover, I’ve got no evidence for this, but logic tells me that many of said manipulators are of the [edited for decency by Dreamslayer] Gold Seller variety.

ArenaNet: Please Implement Direct Trading between players! Stop forcing us to use the Trading Post where prices may be driven by manipulators!

It’s interesting that your “logic” tells you so much about the nationality or ethnicity of people you suspect are doing something for which you have no evidence.

Yet, “logic” would suggest that since there was a direct trading option in Guild Wars 1, but that feature is not in Guild Wars 2, that this is by design, and not oversight.

One thing I really like about GW2 is that there is very little chat spam because there is no secure way to trade with strangers. I trade with my dad and my cousin all the time – but of course I don’t worry about being scammed by my family and you don’t have to see me spamming “WTB 5000 Pebbles – 14c ea – over by Lion statue”

The TP is just one way to get an item – it’s fast and convenient, but not always the cheapest.

If you don’t like the price of something, there is almost always another way to obtain the item, or at least a substitute.

I keep seeing these kinds of threads and it just seems to me that some people see sinister market manipulators under every rock and around every dark corner when in actuality, the supply and demand for many items is interconnected (ie: T5 Mats are closely tied to Ecto, etc) and dynamic.

When Silver Doubloons were spiking up to a price range I didn’t like, I did research to see if there was another way to get them – transmutation, farming, lootbags, etc. I ended up making 200 Silver Doubloons in the Mystic Forge – I saved some money but it was very satisfying to know that I could find other options.

I wonder if a bit more creative thinking might get people further than a forum lament?

Esplen.3940:

BL Merch gives you a Merchant that sells Gathering Tools/Salvage Kits whereas the TP pick up gives you a Trading Post employee (aka allows you to pick up from the trading post).

From what I’ve read, I don’t think the TP Pickup contract spawns a Trading Post NPC the way the consumable does, I think it just lets you use the TP pickup icon from anywhere without having to be physically in front of the NPC.

Nakitten142:

And like the t5, the t6 mat are going to rise too I think… so I’ve probably made a good deal buying all the material for a legendary one weeks ago, and the ecto today at 27s. And if finally I don’t want to make this legendary, I can sell the components with no lose on it (or some proffit… who know). Pretty good deal.

I was fortunate to complete my gifts of might and magic about a week ago.

I sold my last big batch of ecto all at over 28s – it’s fluctuating a lot as some people are willing to drop their price 50c for a quick sale but the mean price does seem to be going up.

The irony for me is that after selling about 10,000 ecto in the last week or so, I didn’t hold back the 250 I still need for my legendary.

So silly.

I don’t mean to cross post because I mentioned this in the crafting forum, but T5 mat prices are on the rise and ecto price is a lagging indicator of T5 mat prices.

At the moment, the very thin margin you can make as an ecto crafter is basically gone so there will be fewer ectos on the market and the price will go up.

T5 crafting materials are increasing in price quite a bit and are all over 1s (sell offers).

It looks like the supply of several mats has been decreasing for a few days driving up prices.

I have not heard of any bot bans and if anything, I would expect that with Wintersday being done, more people would be out and about, collecting and selling materials.

Hmm…

There is no way to audit what people are doing or how much they contribute or share so your idea will create and incentive to share work and loss, but hold back on lucky drops or windfall profits.

Then you would have people with Juggernaut daggers and Sunrise scepters and whatnot.

If any class could get any legendary skin on any weapon, it would just become a “style”, not a unique item.

Would an option to set all opponent models to something completely generic help with the bandwidth issue?

It seems to me that just noting the race, gender, profession and weapon would be easier than transmitting all of the customizations and specific weapon skin info. Maybe that info is packaged efficiently, but it seems unnecessary.

One of the tradeoffs would be the meta information of seeing people in specific armor or weapon skins and knowing – oh, that’s the 252k karma armor or – oh, that guy is probably an upscaled lowbie, etc.

Just sayin…

Now that I say this, I’m going to think about how I could transmute some exotics to make me seem like a lowbie when I’m not

I would like the stack size to increase because when you deal in materials or thing like that, it’s a major pain to enter 32 stacks of 250 at x price.

If nothing else, at least give us a button to let us repeat our last order, good grief

And while you’re at it, let us buy items from the crafting vendors in quantity or full stacks at a time.

Today I had a little spare time so I was bidding on some lodestones. Other people were actively bidding too and I would get a few, then be out bid, etc.

So I pulled my buy order and focused on outbidding every single person who bid against me. We ran up the price a bit but it was kind of amusing seeing people try to wait a bit, then bid over you, then you do it back, etc.

Now was this one or two other players or half a dozen? I have no idea and neither do they and it’s best that way because seeing the same person over bid you by 1c for about 15 minutes is kind of annoying but in actuality, it’s harmless – eventually the price goes to high or people get bored or just get everything they need and stop. Seeing the names of the other bidders has the potential to stir up animosity and have it spill over into other areas. For all I know, I could have been doing that to my friends or guildmates.

The other side of the coin is actually more sinister and problematic:

If bidders and sellers could communicate directly, they could organize and collude against other people in the market.

There is no end to the monkey business that could come from this.

If you just need 1 fractal level, you should mention that up front – there are probably other players in the same situation, but going along with a group like that is pretty close to just leeching as the assumption is that people are there to complete the full fractal.

plasmacutter.2709:

Iehova.9518:

I just hope precursors stealthily become account bound so the people who hoard precursors for no other reason than to manipulate the market get screwed.

I absolutely LOVE this idea

It would totally bone gold farmers and tp players who get a kick out of the misery of the vast majority of the playerbase.

ANET PLEASE DO THIS!

It’s one thing to be frustrated at how hard it is to acquire something, but you’re just advocating that a bunch of people lose a lot of their money or value in a way that does not benefit you or anyone else.

Impoverishing others does not enrich yourself.

Another way to look at it is this – if a man makes a million dollars, he has gained something actually much more valuable than money – he’s gained the knowledge of what it takes to make a million dollars.

The person you can become by doing something extraordinary cannot be taken away.

Aye.8392:

Have you ever considered using a Journyman’s kit instead of a Master’s to test the concept? I don’t salvage 1,000 items at a time, but it would seem that the question could be answered by stepping down the chain instead of up to the Black Lion kit, if someone were willing to risk the ROI that would come if it turns out to be that the kit actually does affect the ecto output. People like me don’t have the money to take the risk in testing, but perhaps some of the major traders would be willing, since in the long term using green or even blue kits would be far more economical than using master’s.

Understand that the margins to be made on salvaging are quite thin and even a gentle breeze blowing through the trading post before you get everything cycled can destroy any potential profit.

As the other poster had said, it does not take much for it to be worth it and I do it as much for the psychic benefit of not having to wonder as I do for the financial benefit.

If I used a lower kit and had a bad streak, I would probably stop – but would that be conclusive? No. I would have to do at least 1000, probably more – and then what?

Someone may do so, but not me.

I should change mine to French or something – give the cities some new flavor…

It is disconcerting to see what happened only because a lot of us would never intentionally use an exploit and can’t help but wonder – would we have seen it as an exploit?

However, what you are talking about is using proper in game mechanics to acquire rare items and salvage them into ecto – this is a normal way to play the game and is quite common.

Now if you found a way to buy the rare items but avoid having your tokens deducted or maybe just having a fraction of them deducted, that would be an exploit similar to what happened (like reaching into the soda machine when they are refilling it, or buying a drink for a .10 coin instead of a 1.00 coin) but you earned those tokens and should be able to extract in game value from them appropriately – either in the form of items or the ecto from the items.

I doubt anyone has any hard statistics on the BL kits because they are significantly more expensive than masters kits and are best reserved for times when you want to guarantee you salvage a valuable sigil or a rune.

Masters kits seems to be around 90% or a bit higher.

Out of my last 5000 salvages (this week), here are the yields (all master kits):

921
898
929
888
924

The thing is, the groups of 25 are incredibly “streaky” – and all over the place from low single digits to as much as 40. The amazing part though is how, over time, it generally evens out.

If you do salvage in volume, my advice is to do it without watching because it can challenge your mental integrity at times

More than 100, less than 1000

I think I see a thread like this almost every day.

It’s not nerfed, you’re just using way too small a sample.

Increase your sample by 1000 and you’ll see.

Nappychappy.7046:

rchu.8945:

do people realize how much the materials for other parts of the legendaries will skyrocket to once this scavage hunt (aka legendary welfare program) is implemented? Be careful what you wishful, but I guess people just assume they can continue to whine and complain til it’s zero effort to get a legendary…

Do you realize how expensive these mats already are?

The very fact that you can buy a legendary makes it a welfare item, the fact that there is no challenge tied to it makes legendary a welfare item. The only thing legendary about the legendary is the grind, or USD spent on pixels.

It should take several things, from materials to challenges to make a legendary, something a tad more “hardcore” to qualify.

It would cost you thousands of dollars in gems to buy a legendary weapon. There are people with the means and some of them have the will, but that is a very small club.

Kainazzo.5847:

Dreamslayer.7659:

I forged about 200 of my 250 Doubloons from pebbles.

They can try to control the supply, but their ability to do so will be limited due to multiple avenues to attain Silver Doubloons.

If you’re going for a Juggernaut, you also need Molten Lodestones – those were about 70s a week ago, now they are 95s if not 1g by now.

There are a LOT of things you need for a Legendary and the best part about making the Juggernaut is that you don’t have to compete for Charged Lodestones.

I’ve got almost all of the expensive stuff out of the way except for the Icy Runestones and about 40 more clovers.

I just don’t see the Silver Doubloons as being that much of a problem compared to some of the other things.

How on God’s green earth are you people getting 200 on pebbles alone? At the rate of 1 per ~60 pebbles that’s a LOT of clicking!

Bind a key on your keyboard to be a mouse click. I have 3 functions keys that are each a mouse click so when I need to do a lot of double clicking (like large buys from vendors) I can just roll my fingers over them.

Still one button per action, but nothing says you can’t spread the workload around to avoid tendonitis

Keep in mind that gw2spidy is crawling the whole TP database using an open API. It’s a good resource, but it’s not quite real time.

If you just wanted to watch maybe 100-200 items, you could probably just make your own script to update much more often and give you better, real time data.

There are a lot of people who buy and sell the same types on things continually and I think the right group of people would benefit from sort of a “vendor” style relationship where the seller makes a little more and the buyer pays a little less by avoiding the 15% TP tax.

It’s probably not worth the risk of a loss and especially getting flagged as a possible gold seller – with lots of money and goods moving through email…

This is the hard part about discussing this topic on a forum. Nobody wants to tell you exactly what they are doing because then everyone will do it and it won’t work and the “opportunity” will shift to another place in the market.

It is fascinating how attitudes in the game mirror those in real life. Some people will never believe that you can become wealthy without cheating or taking advantage of others and those posting that they have done so are simply blind to their own avarice.

It is impossible to be wealthy without gratitude. You can have all the material you need and much more, but the experience of being wealthy is not based on having a specific amount, it’s based on how you feel about what you have.

Tarvok.4206:

“Gentelemen’s agreement” = monopoly trust.

The TP is PvP. Asking this is like asking the other side in WvW to go easy on you.

As far as I’m concerned, you guys are my competitors. My allies are farmers, crafters, and consumers. I will gladly screw my fellow traders to the benefit of those who do not play the TP.

Exactly – this is economic PvP.

Well said.

Sorry, but business is war. Why would I want to enter into an agreement with people I don’t know, can’t know and will never meet?

It’s not like at some point down the road I will be at a Tavern and some Asura will walk up to me and say “remember when you were selling 27 unidentified dyes and you decided to list them at the same price as the 15 dyes already listed? yeah? well those were my dyes! thanks so much for not undercutting me!”

And even if 100 people agree not to undercut, there are still 100,000 people who will never read this or never care and since we can’t tell one bid from another on the TP, how do we know which bits we should “not undercut” and which bids are the proper, nice bids and which ones are the naughty, dirty, undercutting bids?

And what about the buyer side? If I want to bid on a permanent contract, of which there are very few, should I just bid equal to the top bidder and wait for their bid to be fulfilled, knowing that mine will be next? Or should I bid more money and try to buy one first? Because it seems to me that sellers need buyers to keep bidding more than the previous bidder in order to reach the prices we want as sellers. Is that bad?

How about this – why not just have 1 price for everything on the TP and you just list your items for this price and they sell when they sell – first in, first out.

Just because there are millions of green wood logs already posted, why should you try to cut ahead of everyone else and sell yours sooner by lowering the price?

Let me tell you a little secret:

If you have a lot of stuff to sell, don’t list it all at once, at one price. I often sell hundreds or thousands of items at a time, and if I list it all as a single sell order, then, intentional or not, it becomes a sell wall for other players.

If I list 985 ecto for 27.80 and you want to sell 9 ecto, why shouldn’t you sell it for 27.79? Why would you want to wait for my 985 to sell through before you get yours sold? The market could easily shift up or down while you’re waiting.

So even if your idea was workable in some way, you can’t just go on the “no undercutting” policy without including some kind of volume guideline such as “no posting more than 50 items at a given price so that the non undercutting sellers don’t have to wait too long”

Now how would that work? What about the other 935 ecto I want to sell? Should I just post it at a higher price? What if I undercut myself by posting 10 orders that are 1c apart? Am I only hurting myself?

These rules are so confusing!

Whatever “bad” you’re trying to avoid by coming up with this scheme will only create new, other “bads” that will be worse.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

It went from around 0.9 ectos per rare (with a mystic kit) to 0.81

Doesn’t the mystic salvage kit require 3 mystic forge stones? How are these kits cost effective?

Rainzar.6905:

they easily cost more then ecto’s now, and most of the cores too. let’s see if the price can be pushed above 1g (above a few of the lodestones) and keep going till its the “most expensive mat” more then charged lodestone! then maybe someone will notice.

As was mentioned before, there is an upper limit on what Silver Doubloons are likely to sell for because they can be created in the Mystic Forge from pebbles and other low level gems, as well as found in certain loot bags.

I had all 250 of my Doubloons, but I sold them last night to acquire more money to invest. I have a lot of in game things I need to do before I can get my legendary and I didn’t want that money just sitting around doing nothing – so I put it to work.

The ecto salvage rate seems to be consistent over large batches, but it can vary widely in smaller samples.

I salvage 125 rares at a time.

My best yield from 125 was 146 ecto – which was just last night.

My worst yield was 68 ecto which was about a week ago.

The last full batch of 1000 I did, I got 954 ecto so 95.4% (the 146 outlier and a 138 batch were in this group)

I’ve had streaks of 15 with zero ecto and it does make you worry and question, but if you press on, it gets better (at least it has so far).

I don’t know if there is DR on salvage, there could be because subjectively, I feel like I can tell when I’m on a bad streak and when I’m on a good streak – the thing is, humans always want to create meaning out of chaos so while some kind of DR type mechanism is possible, I don’t think it is in place and if it is, it’s influence is minor (+/- 5-10%)

Salvaging for ecto is a gamble and if you only play occasionally, your luck will vary wildly but if you come to understand what the odds are and are willing to accept a level of risk, you can acquire rares at a cost that is likely to be profitable. It takes discipline and in my opinion, you have to create a process that lets you stay inside the likely profit margin even as the market changes.

Now if you’re just salvaging rares you acquire through normal play, my advice would be to sell them.

Those 10 rares in your bag could become 30 ecto or zero ecto but if you sell them, you should net the same money as if you got a 70-75% ecto yield – and it’s guaranteed.

Mystic.5934:

I want to see someone corner the ecto market
spend 100,000 gold to buy every ecto in the game, raising the price to 3g each, then eventually sell for 1,000,000 gold.
man, that would puppy up the economy. every high level rare and exotic would also sky rocket in price.

Not possible.

Ecto can be manufactured from items that anyone can gather.

azizul.8469:

ectos are easy to get now. lvl 80 rare medium armor is the cheapest source of rare if you’re crafting to gamble for ectos. also my guildies tell me you can easily get rares in fractals now. so ectos are flooding the market now, and they may just be an element of currency for anyone.

This is not untrue, but it’s also not new and does not explain the recent, unusual activity.

Look at the level of trade listings (blue and red vertical bars) since about December 24 – it’s been increasing substantially and yet the price has not been coming down much – if at all.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19721

There are about 4000 ectos for sale between the 27s and 27.50s range and many of the listings are in sequence with 1c between them.

In my opinion, if there were simply a lot of sellers trying to undercut each other in a rush to sell (which we would expect if the market was in a real decline) we would see the listings being pulled and added at a lower price. Instead, we have a well built sell wall trying to funnel people into the 26.80s range

It’s easy enough to spot this – just try to buy some ecto and put a check in all the listings between the lowest price and the 27.50s listing. It’s been very stable for the last few hours and the volume is only growing at the low end – none of the interim offers are being pulled.

Of course the people who deal in volume and know how to make money will usually leave their listings up for a while and wait for it to work out, but you would think that a certain number of people with sell orders in that range would panic or lose patience and pull their orders – but this isn’t happening.

I think it’s more likely just a concerted effort to make large buys of ecto at artifically low prices through use of brute force pricing walls.

Usually, multiple buyers will undercut each other and you will see staggered tiers of sell listings. When 10 people post 1500+ ecto at an extremely low price and they all use the exact same price and another person has a large buy order just 1c less – that looks like some sort of collusion:

http://i.imgur.com/yB0pz.jpg

It didn’t happen just once, this was a pattern through out the day and the pricing walls would be disolved and moved downward well before they were consumed.

Some very strange things happening the last 12 hours or so with ecto on the Trading Post.

Not exactly sure how to describe it except it looked like an organized, descending price wall that was trying to keep buy visible buy and sell orders within a 1-3c range that would be about 2-3s below the average, recent price.

I’ve been taking a lot of screen shots, but I’m just wondering if anyone else has noticed this?

FurryPaw.4852:

I am always thinking of starting saving stuffs for legendary~ Gathering materials, crafting gifts! Oh, it’s so exciting! And i’m not that bad with basic flipping on TP, so I do make some basic moneys too~
But… But… But… The reason that I’ve never actually started doing it – is that Karma requirement. HOW do people grind karma… That is beyond my understanding~ That must be SO tedious and hard~ SUCH a monotony, that I give up before even trying xD

Jugs of liquid karma – save them up, then use them with karma boosters from food, banners, gem store, etc. You can get over 7000 karma per jug this way.

Also, I would encourage you to follow your instincts on the TP.

I literally earned half of my Juggernaut in the past 7 days (about 450g worth) – and I never touched a snowflake or BL salvage kit.

You already need about 1 million karma – depending on your luck forging clovers.

You also need, at an absolute minimum, 100g to buy Icy Runestones, 200 skill points for a shard and skill points to get crystals while making clovers.

You already need a gift from a specific dungeon.

Beyond that, the other materials can be acquired in various ways – you can farm them, buy them or use some other mechanism in the game to acquire the wealth needed.

I respect your opinion, but I just don’t see what the problem is right now. The Greatswords are very popular despite the situation with charged lodestones – if they were easier to get, Sunrise and Twilight would be too common.

Everyone is going to have a different path to their legendary – for some it will be relatively easy, for others, excessively hard (we’ve all heard of the people who put hundreds or even thousands of weapons in the forge without a precursor).

I think it’s just fine as it it.