Guild Wars 2

I’ve gotten 42 in the last week and I don’t even have any MF!

One of our guildies and friends is an Anet employee. I’d say 95%+ of the time he’d play without his Anet tag, as he’d get spammed by people when his tag was up.

Periodically though he’d pop the tag in WvW for some fun.

I haven’t seen him play in forever though, and I know he’s still working at Anet.

Also realize that market cornering is not the same as a monopoly. What the OP is doing is market cornering. Monopolies are when a single entity has the sole ability to produce and sell a good. Market cornering is when an entity attempts to gain sufficient supply of a commodity in order to manipulate the price of said commodity.

Since there are no true barriers of entry in the crafting system (either traditional or MF), or to farming, a monopoly cannot exist in this game.

It’s cheaper to craft unless you value your time so much that the components you cannot buy with coin is worth the difference between the TP price and the crafting price.

(i.e. if you think not having to grind karma/SPs/do map completion is worth ~600g in the case of twilight/sunrise)

You need a working understanding of multivariable calculus to truly optimize a monopoly — and if there are other players in the market, even a few, a working understanding of game theory.

If not (which I’m assuming since you’re asking for economics advice on a game forum), then just sell the crap off before you believe there is a risk of the item being re-introduced into the game or a competing item is introduced into the game. Realize if there are no barriers of entry or collusion of parties then a monopoly, and monopoly profits, cannot exist indefinitely.

Azgarn.2145:

Yes I know that RNG exists to keep rare items exclusive… but also shouldn’t dedicated players be rewarded for the effort, time, and money spent playing this game?

Yeah I have had a lot of gold travel through my hands and if I saved and budgeted it, could have bought 2-3 precursors by now, but thats not my point.

But isn’t it the point? You were, during the course of play, rewarded with at least enough resources to afford to buy, by your own account, 2-3 precursors, but instead chose to spend that money on something else and now want a free precursor to boot.

No, you don’t get a free precursor, and you’re not entitled to one either. Chalk it up to learning a good lesson in economics.

Yeah, nothing says smart investment like filling all your bank slots with blue items!

I love big patches because, if you can anticipate what the market will do and act fast enough, you basically get a free legendary worth of profits in the span of a day!

These minis were probably the 2nd most profitable thing for me ever, the first being when I discovered the Triforge ammy recipe and bought up hundreds of gold worth of mats before releasing it…I don’t think I’ll ever see margins like that again unless new recipes are released.

If only we could short — then my TP life would be complete.

eric.8203:

everyone knew this would happen i knew it after i hit lvl 80 and seen only 6 ori nodes vs 300 mithril nodes and monsters/bags dropping t5 items with t6 items and i knew this would suck for getting a legendary. i laughed then cried when i was on my norn war in snowden still getting t1 mats then going to lorners and getting a ton of t3 mats then i find out odd=good numbers even = bad numbers in most cases. looking at t1,2,3 metal nodes then look at t1,2,3 wood nodes t1 umm tired of looking at t2 wtf i see it more than t1 and t3. t3 wood nodes makes me cry and want to buy anet a big giant silver spoon but they already got it from gw1 and ncsoft stole it and has a big bully fee to get it back

This post has truly enlightened me with regards to the T6 mat situation. Thank you so much for this incredible contribution.

Quick! Better spend that 400g to get those bank slots so you can store 100,000 of them and make a few gold profit in a year or so!

Almdudler.8621:

Sorry but for that much experience in the game, you shouldve noticed that as an unintended thing.
Im not jealous neither because I am a flipper nor because I lost potential money. I came here to complain about this issue and the ignorance about some players, why should I feel the need to have used something I complain about? Kind of pathetic and contradictory, but yea there are people like that, but Im not one of them.

Almdudler.8621:

If you re-read my post, I said if you did heavy abuse which you did not, so in your case I dont care, because you werent abusing the heck out of it. I only care about the people who were rich enough and did to exploit this with not a big risk at losing money because statistically they would gain alot if they keep forging (this especially applies for the first people who discovered this) . And if you know you turn out almost guranteed big profit, then you know something is wrong.

I don’t understand how you guys have the time to both endlessly and mindlessly farm/grind an area and complain on these forums so much.

WIll you kindly log out of the forums and get back to farming CoF? Us TP Barons need to make Huge Evil Profit$$$ and your slacking is pushing up the price of farmed goods. Thanks.

PS. If you need a Jack-a-lop or something to get motivated to go back to work just let me know. I’m practically swimming in them at this point!

Gambling is a real addiction.

No I’m serious. I really think many of the people making and posting repeatedly in these types of threads are gambling addicts.

They really can’t help themselves from spending money on beating the odds, despite all the evidence that suggests they will not, simple because there is a “chance”.

Normal coffer ticket rate reported from community efforts to be about ~.02% from ~11,750 trials.

So yeah, roughly 1/5000 coffers will have a ticket.

kokocabana.8153:

Use one to make a mini colossus, keep one for yourself and then sell the rest. I don’t see your problem here. You make a profit no matter what unless you are buying the coffers for the purpose of selling mini knights.

Mini colossus are account-bound.

Osi.3504:

aeneq.1760:

Someone mentioned 5000g+ profit doing this “exploit” however that’s unlikely, the underlying market is too slow moving to warrant such a remark. The cost per pet is due to its rarity not the huge demand (notice I say huge) as such I would suspect he got round 500-1000g tops for (and ofcourse if multiple people did the same thing the price dropped so fast I doubt they even got that).

edit: Yes I agree with the previous post, the ones who did this and were smart enough to keep the pets will probably earn a nice profit but it will take time before all the pets are sold

I’m sure someone made 5000g, why? These holo knight pets were so common they stayed cheap on the trading post, allowing cheap MF recipes…. if the holo knight was rare and stayed the same price as other mini’s, it would have not crashed anything and when you have lots of people who had bids in on jack-a-lops for 150g+, you just made around 125g profit per crafted one.

Actually total volume of minis never really spiked. Most of the devaluing during that time was in anticipation of a future volume spike had the MF method continued.

Anyone who sold during the period when the minis were de-valued didn’t make a large profit. Most of the profit was made on whatever outstanding buy orders were in for the exo minis, which wasn’t a huge amount, or people who forged them and held onto them. Judging with how the price of all exo minis has corrected pretty well in comparison to the pre-crash prices and volumes, it seems the damage with respect to the market as a whole isn’t all that bad.

However, some people (sounds like yourself perhaps) got royally screwed because they dumped minis in panic thinking this was an intentional thing by Anet, only to find out later it was unintentional. Hence my original post above.

1) As a player, I don’t really see it as my job to divine what is intentional market manipulation on the part of the developers vs. unintentional screw-ups. There’s been a number of introduction of items/mechanics in game that have dramatically and permanently affected prices of goods and were viewed as a “feature”. If you didn’t act fast when those changes happened you lost out on major potential profit. I would argue that much of what gives the market “life” is speculation on what may or may not become instantly more or less valuable in the future due to Anet market manipulation. It could easily be misunderstood that Anet wanted to drop exo mini prices for whatever reason, or that the new rare mini was being undervalued on the market by players who weren’t aware of their drop rate.

2) Forging rare minis into exo minis has always been a game mechanic. This wasn’t a new or obviously unintended game mechanic. This mechanic has ALWAYS existed and is essentially the only way to obtain exotic minis, including the new colossus mini that I and, I’m sure others, wanted.

Anet has intentionally manipulated the market in the past via drop rates, game mechanic changes, etc, including c. dust/ectos, mean ecto amount from salvage, drope rate of mats (butter, vanilla, chocolate, T6 mats, etc), among others. Some of these changes have come with announcements, some have been “stealthy”. The ultimate point is that, for serious traders who have studied the market, the ability to determine, with practically no information, whether a change is intentional or not is sometimes impossible (and, I would argue, not our responsibility) until it is explicitly stated, if ever that may be.

The real culprit here isn’t the people who made money off of this. Some people thought it was intentional, others did not. The real issue is no one had any idea what the kitten was going on at the time with regards to what was intentional and what was not. I’m sure Anet tried to make sure something like this didn’t happen, but coding errors and/or mis-interpretations of what would happen in the market do happen at times.

On a slightly different note, is it even clear what the actual issue is? Was it that the drop rate was too high? Or were we not supposed to be able to forge them at all (which would be odd since how else can you get the exo colossus)? Were they only supposed to give the exo colossus when the rares upgraded to exos subsequent to a successful MF try? Were they supposed to be account-bound? I’m still not sure what the specific issue is, except that it relates to the rare holo and the MF.

Don’t be so quick to point blame when in reality there might not be any single entity that is to bear full responsibility of what may have transpired from an unfortunate set of events.

I doubt it makes a difference.

The most cost-effective strategy right now is to buy it.

On average, crafting using exotics is the most expensive way to obtain it. Crafting with rares is, on average, also more expensive than purchasing it but significantly less expensive than crafting with exotics if you sell all the exotics produced from your rare combine attempts.

Believe it or not, precursors are actually relatively underpriced right now compared to the materials used to forge them.

Ballistic.4531:

Ensign.2189:

Mystic forge. You need very large sample sizes for it to be a reliable, which requires both deep pockets and a lot of patience. The people cranking out precursors are throwing tens of thousands of rares into the forge; on that scale luck evens out and the recipes are consistently profitable.

How can you say that MF is a reliable way of getting a precursor? You can throw in 4 rares and get one, or you can throw 1m of exotics and get nothing.
Large sample size just means it will pop-up eventually not reliably.
Chance to get it is just that: a chance, it’s not guaranteed.

The chance of throwing in a million worth of exotics and not getting a precursor is so astronomically small it isn’t even worth considering.

So yes, it is a reliable way to get it should you have the capital to invest (which is in the thousands of gold).

Step 1: Sell Dawn on TP

Step 2: Collect money

Step 3: Buy Dusk on TP

There, I just saved you 300g you would have otherwise lost through getting scammed (or perhaps scamming someone).

I accept all major credit cards.

The Age of Entitlement

Why don’t you try refunding your lottery tickets at the gas station after you scratch it off and see how well that goes.

What you “expect” or think you “deserve” to get out of the chests is irrelevant. At no point did Anet give any expectations as to the drop rate of the items in the chest, nor did they force you to open any chests.

You made a conscious decision to buy keys, based on whatever preconceived notions you had concerning the drop rate of items, which ultimately ended up being far removed from reality.

It’s your own fault for making assumptions and impulsively acting on it, especially if doing so was outside of what you could reasonably afford.

Kita.7819:

The overall problem and aggression with all of this is, yet again, thanks to Sanctum of Rall. This is not Darkhaven’s tier. Maguuma and NSP are treating us like we’re right next to them, or even worse. We’re not. I’ve said this before but I guess it keeps falling on deaf ears.

During Rall vs SF vs DH, this is what the map used to always look like. Rall didn’t put up much of a fight at all.

And then the wvw week ended with Rall winning with 4 times the amount of points SF and DH had combined. A lot can be accomplished with a fly and ohko hack. At random times during the night properties would just change colors without notice.

This is why we plummeted all the way to the bottom. This was never supposed to happen. If things went properly, Maguuma and DH would have been facing each other the week after the first.

But no. We’re not the mighty server. We’re the server that’s ascending through the ranks through luck alone due to this imaginary and dominating night crew you guys keep bringing up. You want to know how many people took your keep in EB last night? 20. That is not a night crew.

Quoted for future reference when DH fails to break T3.

Nightcapping is the main reason why DH is winning, and will result in a similar disparity in score compared to the servers that mainly won with nightcapping that have come before DH.

Having said that, DH is a bit disappointing in the individual skill department for the most part. Being able to take out groups of 10+ with 3 people, although quite fun, is a bit sad. I think they’re going to have a very rough time when they reach the bracket where nightcapping can’t carry them to victory, as previous servers I’ve played against with high night pop such as SoS and FA are much better than DH.

So my advice to DH is: enjoy your population while it lasts. Once you hit that wall, I think that will be the end of DH for the most part.

6x the reward for 1/10th of the effort.

Nightcapping is such an effective strategy, you can use it almost exclusively and still win!

This is a video my friend made of us during the SoS, DB, Maguuma match-up. I think it shows how playing decisively with a small group of players can yield some good results, as well as be much more fun and enjoyable than simply spamming in a zerg.

It also shows that you can play WvW “seriously” but still have a laidback and fun attitude.

Hope you enjoy! Treiz is terrible at making sure to press the record button before fights. I’m sure we’ll be making a few more videos in the future and hopefully he can get better at that…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xcxw6malFkM#!

Slowly turning into “Number of Oceanic Players in Descending Order”

Arius.7031:

Anyhow, for those saying Maguuma doesn’t have much in the way of numbers, I’ll have to respectfully disagree. I play from afternoon well into the early morning, and I see a very strong showing from Maguuma at all times. Even during the night, when I’m fighting them, they always have a zerg up somewhere on the map, and they defend capably against our assaults.

Outmanned buff on every BG for the past 2 hours or so.

Server Rankings should be changed to Number of Oceanic Players in Descending Order

Who are you?

15 character limit

The single strongest predictor of who will win wvw matchups, excluding T1 where there are queues all day every day, is number of oceanic players on the server. Not actual skill, not prowess during even match-ups, not even richest, but total number of oceanic players.

If you have more oceanic players than your opponents, you almost always win by default. This would be tolerable if server transfers were eliminated or limited, so the bottom-ranked servers could fight similarly-populated non-oceanic servers. Unfortunately, the rankings of servers keeps changing drastically due to players swapping from server to server daily or weekly, thus preventing any sort of stability in server rankings.

A 100 point lead that lasts for 6 hours for a server during daytime is completely negated in a single hour by a server that has a 600 point lead due to nightcapping.

Thus, if we value a person’s time based on actual possible results, the time that I spend during primetime is about 1/6th as valuable an oceanic player’s time, who by the way, is playing on a North American regional server.

I’m to the point where I don’t even bother upgrading stuff toward the end of primetime anymore because there is simply no point. No amount of upgrades, skill or tactics can change the outcome when you’re outmanned on every server 3:1 for half the day.

Archer.6485:

@deathTouch

If becoming a TP mogul in order to obtain a legendary is really part of the game then I’ll believe when a dev says it directly.

I really wanna see that post: “We designed the Trading Post as a main part of our PvE endgame so that the top ranked market players can distinguish themselves in the art of GW2 economy gameplay and thus proving that they and only they are deserving of a legendary weapon.”

I’m sure they’ll be making that announcement and confirming your point any day now. Along with the announcement that they will reskin the legendary greatsword into a massive credit card that makes a ka-ching sound everytime you swing it.

If you don’t like making money, you can farm yellow items and throw them in the forge.

Or you can make a legendary focus if that’s more in your budget. Focus precursors haven’t inflated much.

Those are your options.

Please make everything in the game free

Just posting here as a request to the dev team for inclusion of some legendary weapon lore in the game for the future. Basically, I think it would be cool if something named “Legendary” actually had a legend that went with it.

Perhaps even just a little quote like what is on the Triforge Pendant (preferably not uttered by Logan though): “True greatness comes for those who have wisdom to do right, the courage to embark, and the power to follow through.” -Logan Thackeray

Magiofdeath.2745:

So what? It means there’s a lot more grind in this game, which they kept on saying pre-release that there wouldn’t be a lot of grind. They said the same thing with GW1, even for the rarest items, and it ended up being true (there was only a moderate amount of grind). 37.5 months for 1 amulet? That’s a little ridiculous and a bit heavy on the grind side IMO.

The amulet is an exception of pretty much all items in the game right now I think, in that it is dramatically different than all of the other items of the same rarity.

For weapons and armor though, there isn’t a grind for stats. The only thing that you may have to grind is for cosmetic purposes only, and even then it depends on how fast you want it.

This guy LFK gets it.

This discussion is basically “People who find ways to accomplish things” vs. “Victims”.

LFK refused to be a victim and found a way to get what he wants in the system that is given to him.

He get a precursor. You don’t. That’s part of the game.

Magiofdeath.2745:

Except I played GW1 (a more casual friendly game of the same series) as much as I play GW2 probably, and was able to obtain the rarest items in less than 37.5 months. Just saying.

So what?

Oh no, I have too much of a resource, what ever shall I do?

I expect to play an hour a day and acquire the rarest items in the game within 2 months.

If I don’t I’m going to cancel my subscr…

You need a good deal of money to obtain the rarest item in the game.

True fact.

GW2 needs to have a mandatory tutorial about scarcity and supply/demand before character selection.

Yashimata.2986:

You’re kind of starting to sound like one of those people who only likes things because nobody else has them.

Welcome to the concept of conspicuous consumption, the entire point of the legendary weapon.

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

and of course that link brought me to another pointless place and so are all other pointless statements you’ve made.

Well, when you’re out of money trying to get your shield precursor, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

deathTouch.9706:

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

deathTouch.9706:

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

deathTouch.9706:

That’s why they’re worth over 300g.

That’s why you should’ve learned how to exploit the great MF like others did when gold skull was still viable. :o

I suppose this is the 3rd iteration of people whining about the Godskull exploits. The iteration that apparently can’t even remember the proper name of the item anymore because it was so far back in time.

Not really caring about whether its god skull or gold skull but more about how people exploited it and now bashing poeple who find it too difficult to get the precursors with legitimate ways

Too bad I’ve already publicly posted how I made my money, selling tens of thousands of Carrion Krait Slayers to people too lazy to level Weaponsmithing + crafting world’s first Triforge Pendant and investing in the mats before releasing the pictures on official forums.

Among investing and crafting in many other items.

But yeah, keep lumping everyone who is successful at making money in the game as an exploiter: I’m sure it’ll somehow improve your own abilities.

Yep dude, i also happened to have a guildie who made a precursor on 2nd try dude. Everyone can make stories, how did you come up with the gold to make the triforce in the first place :o, obviously not godskull. No point you being here to discourage people from trying to get their precursors in their own way. Your posts in regard to this situation is not constructive.

I went from 30g to 180g in one day crafting CKS when profit margins were 3.5s/sword and I had over 90% market share of all swords sold for about a week. I crafted the Triforge after I bought all the mats for my legendary and realized I still had about 100g left over.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/World-s-First-Triforge-Pendant/first#post346785

Triforge cost something like 45g to craft at the time I made it because Saph and Emerald orbs were valued so low. Saph orbs alone quadrupled in price overnight after posting that recipe.

Why are you so poor? Surely it’s not because you spend much of your time making unsubstantiated claims about people exploiting.

My guildee just got Dusk after attempt #4 of combining rare GS.

300g profit np

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

deathTouch.9706:

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

deathTouch.9706:

That’s why they’re worth over 300g.

That’s why you should’ve learned how to exploit the great MF like others did when gold skull was still viable. :o

I suppose this is the 3rd iteration of people whining about the Godskull exploits. The iteration that apparently can’t even remember the proper name of the item anymore because it was so far back in time.

Not really caring about whether its god skull or gold skull but more about how people exploited it and now bashing poeple who find it too difficult to get the precursors with legitimate ways

Too bad I’ve already publicly posted how I made my money, selling tens of thousands of Carrion Krait Slayers to people too lazy to level Weaponsmithing + crafting world’s first Triforge Pendant and investing in the mats before releasing the pictures on official forums.

Among investing and crafting in many other items.

But yeah, keep lumping everyone who is successful at making money in the game as an exploiter: I’m sure it’ll somehow improve your own abilities.

HolyCowBBQ.6371:

deathTouch.9706:

That’s why they’re worth over 300g.

That’s why you should’ve learned how to exploit the great MF like others did when gold skull was still viable. :o

I suppose this is the 3rd iteration of people whining about the Godskull exploits. The iteration that apparently can’t even remember the proper name of the item anymore because it was so far back in time.

Ulquiorra.6903:

ok…… i stated earlier yes i could have simply purchased my pre cursor however, in all of gw2 i have never purchased a weapon or armor or even accessory to wear, i either crafted them myself, did a dungeon for it, or a friend made it for me.

You bought thousands of Carrion Krait Slayers off the TP to make that video so…

What’s the deal?

Thank you for shopping at Carrion Krait Slayer’s Inc.

We appreciate your business, and hope you enjoyed the craftsmanship and attention to detail that we place in each and every one of the swords we make.

If anyone was wondering how I went from 30g to 600g in less than a week, it was from crafting and selling tens of thousands of Carrion Krait Slayer swords back when the profit margin was close to 3-4s/sword sold (around the 23-24s/sword mark on gw2spidy.com).

95% market share helped too.

Protip: If you’re going to combine 4000 swords (assuming this is 1000 combines), you should probably just train weaponsmithing up and save yourself 100s of gold in production costs. You paid about 25% more than you needed to.

It’s kinda hard to feel sorry for you wasting money when you don’t think things through before you do them.

Here’s the problem: Items created in the game, for the most part, have an infinite lifetime. Let’s take armor as an example:

You buy one armor set you like, and you never need to buy another set again. It never permanently breaks, never wears out and you never misplace it.

Also, each armor set is identical to any armor set produced by another player. There is no branding in game products. Thus items are perfect substitutes for the same item produced by another person, and consequently no one can charge a profit for innovation or creativity.

To create a consistent demand for an item, you need to introduce these two concepts on some level.

The mystic forge acts reasonably well as a way to limit the lifetime of weapons, but since there is no real benefit of throwing thousands of any other type of gear into the forge in order to obtain a super-rare item, it is pretty useless for eliminating these items types from the market.

Archer.6485:

You can expect to spend even more than that. Who knows? You might have to spend double that amount. It’s RNG.

Imagine you had a 50% chance to gain a precursor. On average you should get one after only 2 attempts. But with just a little bit of bad luck it could easily take you six tries to get your first one. That means your investment was 3x bigger than average.

Same thing can happen with really low RNG. You might spend the average which is estimated at 300g OR you could get a bit unlucky and have to spend 3x that amount which is already 900 gold. So good luck.

Or you could get it on your first try and net a profit of close to 300g.

Your post is pointless.

Snow.5269:

deathTouch.9706:

Sounds good as long as the total amount of materials required to make it is worth >300g

Absolutely not. Precursors were going for 10-20g early on.

1) Information was lacking on precursor creation rate. No one knew exactly how rare the precursors were.

2) 20g early on was an incredible amount of money. The mean wealth of players has increased orders of magnitude above what it was when we first saw the precursors.

3) People using the Godskull creation system could sell the precursors at a lower price and still net a high profit margin because their production cost was half of what it currently is.

Keep the items exclusive by using the precursors as a gateway to the rest of the weapon, considering the remaining portions of crafting a precursor can be accomplished relatively easily in a manner of weeks.

Most people complaining about legendaries thus far seem to be a very vocal minority. Most people I’ve interacted within the game so far are doing one of two things:

1) Not crafting a legendary because they don’t have a desire to obtain something that doesn’t give them any additional stats.

2) Working diligently on their legendary without complaining.

The only people I see complaining regularly are on this forum, and most of them have a warped sense of entitlement(i.e. I threw (insert value from 5g-500g) of random junk into the forge and am now quitting because I didn’t get a greatsword precursor).

Nevermind the fact that there are precursors that sell for 50g or less. Or named exotics that look almost as good and sell for 30g or less.

Or that they don’t give any stats whatsoever and are completely vanity.

Or were meant to be the rarest weapon in the game.

It doesn’t matter if this is one piece of a Ferrari or the Ferrari itself. It’s the fact that both a Ferrari and a Volvo will get you to the same location in the same amount of time, but one costs orders of magnitude more than the other simply because it looks amazing and an extremely limited number are made.

That’s why they’re worth over 300g.