Guild Wars 2

I’m gonne roll an Asura, just so I can hear Felicia Day’s voice on Zojja telling me to say ‘yes’, cause she’s the coolest person on the interwebz!

Artificer. By FAR…

I did this from 0 to 375 and it costed me less than 2 gold.
Some remarks…
1. Buy theDust that you need with buy orders on TP ith just 1c higher than the next buyer, the order will fill in fast.
2. Sell everything to a merchant.
3. The items indicated with ** scale up per level. For example, you will need all 6 types of piles of dust for this guide.

0, 75, 150, 225, 300:
Tuning Crystals: 6x Piles of Dust**.

25, 100, 175, 250, 325
Potions of Centaur Slaying: 1xJug of Water, 1xCarrot, 1xLeather Section** & 1xPile of Dust**.

50, 125, 200, 275, 350:
Potions of Ogre Slaying, it requires 1xJug of Water, 1xSage, 1xPile of Dust**, 1xLeather Section**.

Sell it to the highest bidder on TP, then you don’t have to pay any fee out of your pocket, the fee comes from what the buyer pays for it.

And this is really the safest way to go for players that don’t have money to post it. If they borrow money to post it, they might get unlucky and someone else undercuts them with 1c.

That would put them out of business for a long time, cause now they need 2 people to buy that insanely high-prices item before they see any money.

If people are so poor that they cannot post it, they should just count themselves lucky that it dropped and sell it to whoever that is buying it now.

Quite frankly, I don’t know what the prices will do. I find it a fascinating topic and I am curious to see how it plays out.

Something tells me that alot of players saved candy for when prices go back up. Even when they go up to 50c (that is x10, so it is a BIG if), that is only a profit of 95s per stack of 250.

Not bad for an initial investement of 12s50c but because you got to sell so much of them, it is hardly a game-changer.

The chart that you see in GW2 itself is very, ver misleading. You got to use the chart at http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem to see the exact price.

The highest amount to buy 100 was 1g20s, when Halloween hit.
The lowest since then was 74s.
If you need gems and can buy them under 80S, do it.
If you want to buy them as investement… well… I wish you the best of luck with that!

People say that they made a fortue with gems at Halloween. Well, when you look at the graphic, you will see that that is impossible unless they bought the gems way in advance.

If someone managed to sell their gems at the PERFECT moment, they would have gotten 87s for them.

If they doubled their money, they would have bought the gems at 43s. The last time that happened was October 8th…

What I did was level to 70 and then do craft my way to 80, with Artificer. It only costs about 2 gold to get that from 0 to 375.

If you can’t do that, you can buy the level 65 armor and level to 80 with that.
Or just go with any armor, really, the stats on it aren’t THAT important. Most important is a good DPS weapon, preferably a rare from your level.

MrGorkajuice.8391:

He might be gambling, expecting to get undercut, and planning to buy everything undercutting him before cancelling his sale, and reposting it all at “regular” price for profit.

This!

This is typical behavor of a reseller. I know, I did it for years in SWG, lol.

A secondary reason may be that this person thinks there are other resellers for this item. And is hoping they buy him out.

Ah, reseller against reseller war… some good memories there for me!!

Even if you farm 4 hours a day for 4 months… chances are that by that time, the price has went up again…

Jewel.1457:

My main issue right now is charging quite a high amount for bag and bank space. What you get at the beginning is considerably limited considering a couple of things. Decent sized bags cost an exhorbitant amount of gold, and you get a plethora of items, tokens, gear, costumes, and crafting items that take up space, and then there is the issue of the huge drop pool of useless items mobs have (any need for trophies… really). There is so much vying for valuable space that it never ceases to frustrate, it is everyday irritation that Anet appears to be capitalizing on.

I agree with this, except for one (albeit important) thing: at the current gem/gold rate, it is pretty easy to buy a new bankslot. 600 gems costs 5g20s at the moment. That is abot 3 hours of playing in Orr at 80.

If you can not do that to keep a game free, your attitude is wrong, I think.

In the future, who knows… if gem prices keep rising like this, this may become a problem. But for now, it is certainly doable.

Totally aside from that… if you prefer subscription-based games, just buy for 15$ a month gems! That gives you 1,200 gems every month which you can use for two bank upgrades every month.

And as last resort… you get 5 free characters. You can easily swap items between characters through the bank, because the bank is shared storage. It costs you less than 1 gold to make 4 alts, buy 4 bags with 10 space for each and put stuff in them.

Bottom line: yes, Anet deliberatly puts in content that use bag space to sell gems. But you can buy a new bank slot for 3 hours of grinding if you don’t want to pay money.

It is simply impossible for a player to obtain a legendary through normal game-play.

Maybe it was possible at the start of the game, I don’t know, but right now the only way to get a legendary is to buy gold, plain and simple.

OldRodKS.9758:

To the SoR group currently camping our spawn on the ET BG… do you really have fun doing this? Seriously?

Mixed group, not any one guild. 8-10, sometimes more. Just camping our spawn. How do you report this? There’s no option on the “report” menu for spawn camping.

Yes, apperently they must think that spawn camping is fun, because they seem to keep going with it. Yesterday SoR even builded ballistas and catapults in front of our spawn, God knows why.

They don’t even consider camping right in front of our spawn as spawn camping; oddly enough.

And, no, you can’t report childish people for acting childish.

x per fection x.2096:

Then don’t buy them? No need to come make a post about how your going to not buy them.. just don’t. i actually took the time to log in and post something for once because i think this is the dumbest most “give me attention mommy” post i’ve seen in a long time.

No. This is a customer telling a company that their prices are too high.

It is an opportunity for that company to learn about how to serve their customers better. And we all get better from that.

Saying ’don’t voice your opinion’ and trying to bully someone into silence deprives Anet from the possibility to learn and see how they can a- make players more happy and b) make more money.

And yes, I think Anet should do more about these bots and gold sellers. Not just about the ones that still exist now, but also about the damage that they did to the game.

Almost no honest person can pay 400g for a weapon.

By allowing such items to be so extreem rare and tradeble, Anet rewards gold-buyers.

There is a reason why most MMOs don’t let you buy gold with dollars and why most MMOs don’t let high-end items be tradeble: together, they create the perfect environment for gold-selling.

First… you got realize that your friend is an exception. Not alot of people make 75g a day.

Second, your friend is a criminal. As in a go-to-prison real-life criminal. He helps thieves that make money with stolen accounts.

You got one thing in your life: you are honest.
He has another thing in his life: he has money. In a game!

Not alot of people would feel good about themselves with being dishonest, no matter how much gold they have in a game.

- These bots and account-selling gold sellers cause alot of emotional pain to people who loose their accounts, accounts the player put their time in. Players who will likely never enjoy a game anymore, out of fear.

Bottom line: don’t say ‘I am unhappy because my friend has more money than me’. Say ‘I am happy because I am honest and do not make other people unhappy’.

I would sell the skin. And even sell it now.

- My guess is that the price of the skin will go up in the future, because there is such a low supply. But there is also a low demand. Not alot of people will sink so much gold into that particular look.

So, it is entirely possible that no one will buy it of the TP for months. But then you’re in trouble, because you do not know what skin they will come up with for christmas. For Valentine. For Eastern.

- It also depends on your ‘inventory’. If this is your only high end item that you can sell, you can not take the risk, I think.

If you had 4-5 of that type of items, you could take the risk. Even if one of them fails to sell, you’re still okay. Selling such high-end items is very lucrative, but you need to have a certain number of them, else failing on one item is a catastrophy.

1. Sure, report him when he steals your money. One single report doesn’t do much, but if 2-3-4 people report him for the same reason, he’ll surely gt a punishment.

2. Slark, can you please point me to the rule that says we can not use the mail system to buy things? I never heard about that rule and thought that mailing stuff from/to trusted people was a legitimate way to do business.

What should REALLY bug you is that a newbie that just opens one single chest can get the permanent merchant.

I like this game. But the lottery element is waaaaaay too much.

Ceronose.6019:

You ban players for buying gold from gold sellers because why? If they want to get their account hacked, so be it. Why do you ban them? Is it because you want them to spend money on you and only you? I think that’s the reason.

Ofcourse they want you to spend your money with them. D’uh!

And, yes, the account thives (aka gold-sellers) sell gold cheaper than Anet. That is for the same reason as a car thief sells the car cheaper than General Motors: they didn’t had to do anything to make it.

Anet made the game. If you don’t want to support Anet and not buy gems, I understand that.

But if you want to support the thieves that steal accounts from other players and steal money from Anet, you are no better than the thieves themselves.

That being said…

I do agree that the gem price should be fixed. People that use gems to get TP items loose money over time because of two trends:
- TP items getting more expensive
- Gems getting more expensive

That is not the way to go in the long run for Anet, I think.

Ljiona.9142:

We deserved to lose this week, we got out-played.

I disagree. It’s not because they took all the orbs in the first hours of the week that WWW should be finished for the whole week, due to big the orb-powers.

Science.6709:

Transfer every Friday. Got it.

Yes, that pretty much sums it up.

Very weird ‘solution’ for the WWW tranfer problem, very weird.

It’s part of an orb cheat where you take the orb and loose the keep on purpose.

You’re supposed to do that with both orbs of the opposing teams in the beginning of the week and you are guaranteed to win the week WWW, due to the insane orb buffs.

I don’t understand this decision at all… Guilds can still transfer for free to a ‘winning’ serverevery weekly cycle and immediatly play in WWW. How does this solve the WWW problem?

Very weird decision from a WWW point of view.

OldRodKS.9758:

Well, according to the wiki:

“Player limits are not yet finalized, but current estimates are that each of the four maps support up to 500 players, split across the three worlds, for a total upper limit of 2,000 players across the entire WvW match”

I hope that it is not ‘’500 for all sides together’‘, but like ’’166 for each side’’ else the imbalance would even be greater.

OldRodKS.9758:

last night I queue’d up for TC BG map and had to wait about 5 minutes to get in, so that means we had 500 people on the map right?

I doubt that that 500 number is accurate. I had to queue too and there is no way that there were 500 people on at our side. Not. Even. Close. Our mini-zerg was like 40 people and there were maybe 50 other people running around.

I seriously doubt that the cap is 500.

Warlord.9074:

Plus its not like you cant exit, there are multiple ways out of the spawn on top of that

No… SoR even puts 10 people outside the TC spawn point on the Eredon map. Ofcourse, sometimes it’s fun, because if you’re lucky you can fear them into the range of the legendary defenders and they die.

But all-in-all, camping on spawn points makes the whole WWW thing a very sad experience this week.

Well, as long as Eredon continues to fight people from TC instead of SoR, this map will stay that way.

Seriously… all 4 maps are green and you go after the few blue spots…

>> Score update: no reason to play WvW this week.

Yeah. There needs to be some tweaks to the system. Some ideas that would make things more fun would be…
- Less powerfull orbs.
- Reset the map once or twice during the week.
- Make people queue when their side has +/- 15 people more then the other sides.
- Give some supply to the main location.
- When there are less than 20 people of your side, let them carry 20 supply each.
- Change the spawn area so that it’s easier to go to another supply camp than the north.

Kalemar.4873:

I can’t help but feel that if Eredon had a larger force SoR would not be as dominant as they are (obviously).

Not only that, but Eredon fights against TC. I’ve been killed three times by Eredon forces that were skirmishing SoR.

Katsumoto.9452:

A few want 100% map completion. But that doesn’t account for all of it. Some move for friends.

Then why do those friends move?

The only why to explain these numbers are that there is a group of people (including commanders) that just want to win at something.

It would be easy to solve by Anet, just don’t allow tranferred people to WWW for -say- 48 hours. I’m not sure why they don’t do that, it would make the system alot more fair.

split.3659:

Our success is due to the hard work of every individual fighting along side me. However, we would not have succeeded without the precision and timely execution of our officers.

Yes, well done.

But you fail to mention one liiiiittle detail: by that time, you already had all three orbs. they were taken in the first few hours after reset. It’s pretty much impossible to win on a capped map against the team that has 3 orbs.

And that was SoR strategy: take the 3 orbs in the first few hours and win the week.

If you want to call that balanced, let’s respectfully agree to disagree on that topic!

martillos.3790:

tc had round the clock coverage against fort asp last week why dont you just bring those numbers to this matchup oh wait half of you porobably already transfered to sor lolzz

Yeah. Last week, we won because of people that transferred in to us, this week you win because of people transferring in to you.

The system is broken

No, this match will not pick up at all, I’m afraid.

The team that went in after the reset, won all the maps and upgraded all over the place. As it so happens, that was also the server where peopel could still tranfer too.

These free transfers are killing WWW, plain and simple.

Yes, the UI can be better. The whole TP UI can be better, to be honest.

That being said, there are several ways to know the current price…

1. Knowledge. You get 30% less gold for your gems than what you pay for them when you sell them at the same moment.

2. Buy 1 gem, check the Gem for Gold, look at the actual price for 1 gem and you got your price.

3. Check http://www.gw2spidy.com/

>> But what possible benefit is there to forcing
>> them to relist it?

They won’t relist it if they have to pay 5% each time. It is not just a matter of time limits, but also of having to pay the 5% fee each time. They will lower the price so that it sells. They have to.

Take the following example…
Seller 1 : asks 1g
Seller 2 : asks 1g
Seller 3 : asks 1g
Seller 4 : asks 1g
Seller 5 : asks 10g
Seller 6 : asks 10g
Seller 7 : asks 10g

When you have no relist cost, seller 5, 6 & 7 will keep their item there forever.

This is a disaster, because sooner or later, someone like me comes along, buys the 4 lowest priced items and relists 1 of them for 9g99 each.

If it sells, I make 5g99.
If it doesn’t sell and someone else undercuts me to 9g98, I place a second on up for 9g97.
If it sells, I make 9g97.
And so on.

Easy peasy money for me.
Result: the price of this item just went up with 900%.

This would be much harder to do when all sellers put their item up for 1g, which would happen when you got to relist and pay 5%: the sellers 5-7 will put up their item for less than 10g when it expires. they won’t pay 50s to relist an item that has virtually no change of selling before it expires again.

oZii.2864:

Go tell a judge that it was to expensive to go the legit route see how far that get you.

Well, to be honest, it would get you pretty far, if you needed life-saving medication that drug companies only seel at a very inflated price.

But in game-terms, you are 100% right. Botters are cheaters. People that buy from botters are cheaters too. I even consider players that do not report bots to be cheaters as well.

They need to step up their game to stop botters, before it is too late and too much gold is in the game.

Even today I reported 7 botters (including 4 naked level 30s in an level 80 area, lol).

It is shared, so no need for hopping.

I assume that this is partly done to prevent server hopping (especially with free transfers) and partly to prevent a few players to manipulate the market on their server (which is typically something that gold-farmers do to make lots of money).

Hippocampus.8470:

The fact that crafters in this game expect to be able to make a profit on certain items, despite readily available pricing information which would tell them exactly how much difference there is between current mats cost and current finished item cost, is not the fault of inflation or of the market. It’s the fault of crafters who are bad at really simple economics and also who are apparently unable to check the Internet before making crafting decisions.

In theory, this is true. Except that…

a) Alot of the stuff that you see on sale is only created to get to 400. People sell it for whatever price they can get.

b) Alot of crafters consider the materials that they gathered as ’’free’’ and do not count their costs towards the price of the end-product.
They simply fail to see that when you use a material that you can sell for 1s, costs you 1s to use, even when you mined it for free.

c) When you make 10 items that costed 10s each and sell 8 for 20s each, you might want to sell the remaining 2, even at a loss. That doesn’t mean that crafting the 10 items was a bad decision.

Hippocampus.8470:

A time limit would hurt the convenience of the TP without providing any real benefit, since those same orders could just be re-posted whenever they expire.

They can be reposted, but you got to pay 5% to list an item… People will not just list an item at some crazy price anymore when they got to pay 5% rach time they relist, they will try to get their item sold before it expires.

In my opinion, this is a good thing.

Jia Shen.4217:

Yesturday I sold a stack of 250 green wood at 9c each. It sold in two lots (164 and 86) my proceeds after the sale was 20s 25c. I can’t seem to get what I made to line up with the fees even with rounding. Every way I run the numbers I calculate less than that amount. Not that I’m complaining but I’m posting the info as I said I would next time I remembered to check on the sale of a stack. Any incite?

250 × 9c = 22s25c.
You pay 10% sellers fee and thus keep 90%.
22c25c * 0.9 = 20s25c exactly the amount that you got.

Note that you also paid a 5% listing fee, but that is paid when you place it on the TP, not when it sells. The 5% is also harder to see, because it is taken from your inventory.

Yes, they stay there until you die, logoff or waypoint (to another area iirc).

As a former SWG billionaire, I can tell you that the ’’average’’ is very, very misleading.

Take the following example: 10 players have 1-10 gold, 10 players have 10-20 gold, 10 players have 20-30 gold and 1 player has 400 gold.

The average player doesn’t exist in distributions like this.

Also, as mulch said, gold isn’t everything… go to your bank, take out all the collectables and sell them… you will see that you will have WAY more gold than you think.

By the way, I follow these steps when my inventory is half-full:
- open all the bags
- salvages all the whites with crude (yes, crude) salvage tools
- deposit all collectables in the bank
- sell all green & blue to a merchant
- sell all yellows & unidentified dyes to TP

It depends on your class, really.

With my warrior (first character) leveling was fast untill level 60 or so. Ofcourse, I always updated my weapon with the best DPS I could, but I killed pretty much everything easy with the signet build.

It slowed down around 60, so I leveled to 70 and then paid about 2g for crafting materiels to level art from 0 to 400 and got to level 80.

All in all, the leveling was pretty easy.

>> The biggest problem is that we’ve had
>> a few weeks of hype about an event starting
>> on the 22nd. Nowhere on the site has it said
>> (until now) that it’s only starting at 1am
>> (or later) on the 23rd for EU players. Everyone
>> was expecting it this evening.

Yeah. Living in Europe, I got to wait another day. I do no like that, I don’t like it at all.

But there are people in the world with problems a liiiiiiiiiiittle bit bigger than having to wait till 1 AM for something that was promised the day before.

I’ll survive the one extra day that I’ll have to wait.

How about you?

Of all the MMOs that I know, this game has the most non-combat things to do (with the exception of The Shire in LOTRO but that is just one area).

Yes, most regular and event-quests are combat, but all MMOs are like that.

I can see the market for a crafting MMO or a building MMO, but other than that, this game has more non-combat things than other existing MMOs.

Well, you’re only at 55.
a) you level slower at higher levels than at lower levels
b) you do not kill as fast as before at higher levels.

It depends probably a bit on the class, ofcourse, but I doubt that you can level from 50 to 80 in your level 50 armor.

What I did on my first character (a warrior) was more-or-less this…
30 : buy top-DPS weapons
35 : buy top-DPS weapons
40 : buy top-DPS weapons plus level 40 green armor
45 : buy top-DPS weapons
50 : buy top-DPS weapons plus level 50 green armor
55 : buy top-DPS weapons
60 : buy top-DPS weapons plus level 60 green armor
65 : buy top-DPS weapons
70 : level to 80 with a crafting skill
80 : buy two exotic weapons and a set of rare armor

And you can do this VERY cheap, especially if you place buy-orders.

Sure, you CAN do without. But you will see that you will die less and level faster when your equipment is not so outdated.

morphemass.2850:

What drives me insane about this is that there are so many posts on the topic you would have though that they would have added a hover over and help icon which explained this to players…..

Yes, I agree. It’s true that many players ask this exact same question. Some people blame that on those players. But knowing MMOs, these questions won’t go away unless the information that is provided in the game is better on this topic.

Colonel Kernel.7506:

John Smith.4610:

It’s my understanding that this is already in place. We still have some unfulfillable orders up that we need to clean, but no more should be created.

And you can, in under an hour, write an auto updating SQL script to clean them all up.

It’s not hard if you cheat and use Excel to set up your values.

Yes, I do not understand why those under-valued items are still there. Any decent DBA could come up with a pretty easy SQL that sets them all to ’’cancelled’’ and makes them available for pickup at the TP.

Something like…

update TP_DB
set cancel_switch.TP_DB to TRUE
where item_ID.TP_DB in
(select item_ID.TP_DB
from TP_DB, merchant_DB
where offer_price.TP_DB < buy_price.merchant_DB
and type_item.TP_DB = type_item.TP_merchant)

… or something like that (has been a few years since I wrote an SQL, lol).

There is no trade of gems between players. The faster you realise that, the more the system makes sense.

You do NOT buy gems with gold from another player.
You buy gems from Anet for gold.
You do NOT sell your gems for gold to another player.
You sell gems to Anet for gold.

There is also no real fee of 15% when you buy gems with gold nor another 15% the other way around. No, they have just decided to buy gems at 30% less than what they sell them for at the same time.

People like that are probably thinking : ‘’well, this item is worth less than 2 silver, because else someone would have bought it for 2 silver by now’’.

Basically, they say that the price of an item is not defined by the price that sellers want from them on th TP, because the items on the TP are the ones that didn’t sell yet.

Are they right? That’s a matter of interpreation. We can argue hours about this. I love to discuss stuff like this, preferably around midnight in a shady bar with a beer and some friends. Hours!

When the items sells, you loose another 15%…

So…
1. When you put up an item for 15s, they take 75c as listing fee, money they take immediatly from your wallet.
2. When the item sells (for 15s), they take 1s50c as commission, money they take from the price, so that you end up with 13s50c in the TP to take.