Guild Wars 2

TerminalMontage.5693:

I like this, then the ecto prices can come down to a reasonable price, and for people going to super exotics or legendary, needed 2 stacks of them will still be difficult, understandably.

This wouldn’t change the price of ectos, except to the extent that the average number of ectos per salvage would increase from 0.88 (or whatever it is now) to 1. Eliminating the variance in outcomes doesn’t change the supply/demand curves at all.

Tallis.5607:

LFk.1408

I obtained my precursor (the legend) for cheap, after the Karka event.

LFk.1408

On the whole, I feel like the legendary weapon is entirely too easy to get.

Gee… you are so… well… I can’t find a word that would not break the TOS…

You got LUCKY. Plain and simple. There is no other word for it. L.U.C.K.Y. You did the same as we all did, but because your RND gave the right number, you got your legendary.

I read his post to mean that he bought the precursor off the TP right after the Karka event when they were relatively cheap, not that he luckboxed it from the event.

Here’s how my Mystic Forging worked out tonight. I placed buy orders for my materials this morning which took me about 5 minutes.

I logged on tonight, and I’d purchased about 32g worth of materials through the buy orders.

I combined all of the materials in the forge, and it took me about 30 minutes to do so. It was roughly 220 combines. From those combines, I received 111 items that I either posted on the TP or sold to a vendor. (The other combines resulted in items that I recombined.)

I posted my items on the TP for a total of 53g49s03c. It’s a liquid market, and the vast majority of these items will be sold within 24 hours.

After TP fees, I project to gross 45g26s68c, and I also vendored 17s worth of items as well. So my profit projects to be about 13g50s or so. Even if I have to relist a few of my items, that should cost me no more than about 10-20s in extra fees.

So let’s call it 13g in profit for five minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. I projected 12.13g profit in my earlier post, so Zommoros smiled just a little bit on me today.

About 80% of the time that I do this, it works out roughly like this. The other 20% of the time there’s a lot of competition for materials and my buy orders don’t get filled too well so I either skip that day or work one of the less liquid markets with less competition.

It’s a bad day to buy wine… but a fine day to drink it.

Cymatoperior.5942:

The casino will always make more money than the gambler. Thats why even anet is selling chests. If you are honest to yourself and did a real calculation, you will find that you arent making as much money as the smart farmers.

I started with 1g I saved up from Queensdale and Kessex Hills. I now have 300g banked plus I maxed 5 crafting professions and bought full exotics for my main. I’ve been doing this MF thing for about 5-6 weeks and get maybe 10-15 hours a week of play time, half of which I spend in Lion’s Arch and half of which I spend playing the game (WvW on my main or leveling alts).

I mean, maybe farming is more profitable. I don’t know. I’ve never even unlocked a waypoint in Cursed Shore on any character. Never run a dungeon. Can’t ever commit time to a group because my life can always force me to log out at a moment’s notice.

I just get the idea from all the QQing on the forum that farming isn’t as profitable. Maybe smart farming is.

Cymatoperior.5942:

Rare items prices have shot up 2 fold, from 14s to 28s now. If you seem to be making money from the MF you will soon not make much cos other people will also do the same and push raw material prices up. I farm cursed shore before the quests bugged the hell up and made lots of gold selling the rares I find to gamblers like you. Hell I even sell the bags I pick up cos I know you people love to gamble.

The prices have not risen on anything I put into the Mystic Forge except for one market, and while the materials in that market have increased in price, the products have also, so it’s actually a more profitable combine than it was before the prices rose.

And I never buy bags, though I’m told there are opportunities to make money doing it.

I have also never lost money on a 30-60 minute Mystic Forging session. The only gamble is whether I’ll make a little money or a lot. That’s because I only do combines with a high ROI because why do riskier ones if the safe ones are out there?

I dunno, man, there are so many profitable combines, and my bread-and-butter ones have been around for at least a solid month since I figured out how to do this. Granted, sometimes this particular combine I’m doing tonight is worth 6s per combine, and sometimes only 3s, but it’s been profitable 100% of the time for over a month, and it’s a lot more often 5-6s than only 3s.

And I’m counting the time you take buying stuff on TP. If I had eight free hours per day to do nothing but try to make money in GW2, I think I’d average 100g/day easily. Probably considerably more than that because presumably I’d get much better at making money.

There are many different ways to get materials. You can put in buy orders on liquid stuff that get filled almost immediately, and if you sit there nursing the TP to keep your buy orders on top you’d get a constant supply of mats. Then there are semiliquid ones that get filled more sporadically, but the margin is higher on those. And there are illiquid combines where there’s almost no competition for the materials, and the margins are through the roof, but the products take up to several days to resell.

There are also combines where you can buy the stuff straight off of sell orders and make a 100-200% profit. But you can only do those once in a while because you have to wait for the stuff to drop more and get listed again.

If you did each day a mixture of the bread-and-butter liquid combines against competition and various less liquid but higher margin combines, I think it’s fair to call it both reliable and to quote a Xg/hour figure for it.

Also, there’s no “money shot” involved in what I do. Most I’ve ever sold anything for on the TP is about 9g. It’s all steady, smaller stuff. Every morning when I wake up and look at the market, the opportunities are always there.

(BTW, I don’t recommend just grinding the TP and Mystic Forge for hours on end. I only do it 30-60 minutes at a time every few days. But I do put it out there as an option for all those who complain about how horrible the grind may be to get a legendary. You can get all the cash for it within a week, comfortably, if that’s what floats your boat.)

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

There is no reliable way of making money with the MF unless you throw skillpoints in it.

If you insist.

I’m about to hit Forge approximately 220.5 times, and I’m sure you’re right that I won’t make on average about 5.5s per combine this time for about 12.13g profit in the next 45 minutes or so.

I buy things off the TP, put them in the Mystic Forge, and sell the products. I make about 10-15g/hour doing this, though I personally don’t play more than an hour or two per day.

I don’t think 25g/hour is unreasonable at all. Basically all you’d have to do is do what I’m doing, but play two markets at the same time, maybe one market liquid with lower margins and one market less liquid with higher margins, and play different less liquid markets from hour to hour to give your stuff time to sell.

Frankly, I’d be surprised if someone out there wasn’t making 50g/hour or more… possibly much more. There are so many ways to make money. If you can juggle several of them simultaneously with bag/bank space limitations and what have you, and you have enough cash on hand to take full advantage of a particular market, there’s really no particular limit on how much you can make.

I also limit myself completely to arbitrage. If you were to buy and hold strategically, that could potentially be a high gold/hour boost.

Iehova.9518:

majorkong.9073:

This isn’t even technically correct. Hardware RNG is ubiquitous these days in computing.

Do you even know how RNG works?

Yes. Do you?

For instance, this hardware RNG ships in every Intel Ivy Bridge processor

http://www.cryptography.com/public/pdf/Intel_TRNG_Report_20120312.pdf

MrGorkajuice.8391:

Technically correct. Practically irrelevant. True random is only believed to exist in quantum mechanics, yet the dependancy on newtonian physics isn’t a dealbreaker for real casinos.

This isn’t even technically correct. Hardware RNG is ubiquitous these days in computing.

tigirius.9014:

Actually no…because ANY mathematician worth his weight in water will tell you that no one can make an equation that generates an absolutely random result

This part is true, though you’ve used it to imply something that’s not at all true. The rest of your post… lacks accuracy.

A few Wikipedia articles to illuminate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

I ate some food as I entered the instanced to talk to the queen in personal story quest Accusation, and I instantly morphed into a spider!

Sindariel.2354:

People got 2 rares and 2 exotics at the end of the event as a reward -> Thousands of players sold these items to the TP -> Prices went down the river.

Yup.

Was impressive to see the TP get flooded with sell orders like that all at once.

In patch notes they said they upped the drop rate of yellow and orange items. I didn’t notice much change all weekend.. and then POW.

Astraea.6075:

Firstly, I suspect most of the people who do this aren’t reading this subforum.

That’s where you’re wrong!

I do this all the time, posting sell orders at 1c above the merchant price. Sure I’m losing a few copper compared to what I’d get from a merchant, but it’s well worth it to know that by doing so I’m ruining the fun for thousands of people.

I forged the following items

3 Rare Level 53 Strong Cabalist Coat Of Infiltration
1 Rare Level 54 Ravaging Conjurer Chest Of The Rata Sum

and received nothing in return. I did this same forge five times. Four times I received an appropriate item, but once I got nothing.

Mesmer is fine from level 2, there’s just a learning curve to it. Here’s my suggestion:

1. Always keep your gear up to date. There’s no reason to even lag 5 levels behind in gear. Most blue items are available on TP for vendor value, so you can just vendor your old blue gear and buy up to date blue gear from TP for same price or just a few copper more. There’s a TP guy in every zone.

Also, just wear blue gear to 80. Green gear loses its edge in just like 2 levels, and yellow gear is 4 levels I think. Not worth the price premium. Just stay in blue. Then upgrade to exotic.

2. Stack toughness and vitality gear.

3. Put Decoy in your bar the moment you get it. Toughness + Vitality + Decoy + Focus (for swiftness) means you basically never have to get downed. You can take on four mobs at a time and then if a fifth and sixth add, you just temporal curtain and decoy and you’re out.

4. Use sword+focus and GS or staff. Learn to use the focus. There’s a learning curve, but it’s really good.

5. Give yourself chaos armor repeatedly by laying down an ethereal combo field (chaos storm, null field, etc.) and then using the #3 sword ability. This one is big if you haven’t been doing it already. It’s easy if you’re using staff. You chaos storm, swap, hit #3 for chaos armor.

6. Here’s what I’d take for traits. First 10 points in Dueling and take the Sword skill. (Or if you are willing to respec, first five points in Illusion and then respec once you have 10 points and put them in Dueling.) The sword skill lets you blurred frenzy faster, and BF is an awesome skill. You can also try sword offhand once you have this trait, since it benefits also.

Next 5 in Illusions for Illusionist Celerity

Next 5 in Chaos for the Regen at 75%

Next 10 in Domination for more power.

Once you hit 40, as everyone says, you use your training book and respec, and whatever you choose I’d suggest 20 in Dueling and grab clone on dodge and at least 5 in Illusion for Illusionist Celerity. (IMO you have 5 in Illusion at all times after level 25.)

It’s 10 levels per 1-400. You get more levels 300-400 than you do 1-100. Keep going, you’ll get your levels.

@OP Read what Homitu wrote. That’s the definitive answer for you. As for your 8 slot backpacks, put some buy orders for them on the TP and forget about crafting them. You’ll save yourself a LOT of money.

ANet specifically denied DR on salvaging.

Yes the MF can give you something like 8 different soulbound runes.

Honestly it takes me <5 minutes to do one. You just filter, type in all the numbers, write the averaging equation, and you have your answer.

You don’t need to make any combines to compile the spreadsheet for many items if you understand what the MF is going to give you.

Take green dyes, for instance. There are a fixed number of green dyes in the game and a fixed number of yellow dyes. If you put four green dyes into the MF, you will get back either a green dye or a yellow dye. Just filter the TP for green dyes and write down all the selling prices. Then filter the TP for yellow dyes and write down the selling prices. Take a weighted average of the two, and voila, you have a pretty good (though not 100% perfect) estimate for the average value dye you’ll receive from the MF for combining four green dyes.

I have no idea if green dyes are profitable or not b/c I haven’t run the numbers. But that’s how you’d do it.

If you did lvl 80 weapons or armor, it should be relatively similar. If you did lower level weapons/armor, you’d probably have to do a few combines to figure out what level range you’ll get back out.

Other point is that the upside when you find a play is often much greater than the downside if you goof, because when you’ve found a good one you can run it as long as you want until it’s burned while when you find a bad one, you stop.

@Galandil

I didn’t do any trials. I used information posted by others who have used the MF regarding the 80/20 split and then made the assumptions that the MF would be designed in a simple way (80/20 splits across different item types, no favoritism for or against any particular item).

Of course it’s possible that the MF is designed with different splits for every item type and with biases toward or away from certain outputs. I just made the guess it wasn’t the case, that the rules would be simple and relatively consistent across item classes.

I also only pursued combines with a large profit margin and therefore a margin for error. On the combine I’m doing now, the true split could be 90/10 instead of 80/20 and I’d still be roughly breaking even. So if my assumptions turned out wrong, I hopefully wouldn’t get burned too hard.

IRL you can find profitable plays on slot machines using this process. You make a guess about some of the internal rules about how the thing works and then you can calculate EV. If you have experience with slots, your guesses will usually be right and you’ll usually be correct that you’ve found a good play. And if you are wrong and walk into a bad play, hopefully experience will tell you relatively quickly that you might have goofed before you burn too much $.

@LFk I agree. Legally there’s nothing about this game that can fairly be considered gambling.

I think @azazil has a point that placing gambling mechanics like MF in a kids game raises some ethical questions. If I were designing a game that children would play I likely wouldn’t have something like MF in the game.

But I also think that educating people about how gambling works-the math behind it and so forth-helps to prevent problem gambling. In general the problem gamblers I’ve met are the ones with the most ignorance about gambling and how it works.

@morphemass

Most combines are duds. But for the combines I do, the average value of all products after, say, 1000 combines is much, much greater than the cost of the 4000 inputs. It’s about 6 silver profit per click.

Also you have to be careful about looking at your records to determine the percentage of upconverts. There’s lots of randomness, so in one sample you’ll get 15% and in another you’ll get 25%. There’s statistical methods to help you figure out what the "true"percentage is from observed data, but right now there are so many combines where the profit margin is so huge that it’s profitable even if the rate were only 10%. So I don’t really care to take the time to try to get a more accurate number than 20%.

I placed a bunch of buy orders last night after starting this thread. I spent 30 minutes this morning clicking away the purchases, and I made about 10g or so.

Some notes. This is gambling. IRL, I have winning days and losing days. And sometimes I have long losing streaks. I need to have enough backup capital to absorb temporary losses. This is my bankroll, and you also need a GW2 bankroll to do this sort of MF gambling.

On average I make 6s per combine. But I can go hundreds of combines and still be down gold if I fail to catch my fair share of the top prizes (the 6g, 4g, and 3g items from the example above). Or I can catch more than my fair share of the top prizes and run my money up very quickly. It all averages out to roughly 6s per combine in the end, but I need enough gold in the tank to absorb the bad runs. Fortunately, this particular combine that I happened to find makes money so fast you don’t need much money behind.

Cliffs notes. Item A turns into one of 100 items. Take the weighted average value of these 100 items (remembering the 80/20 weight on improvement), and if the average value of the output is significantly greater than the cost of the inputs, you have a profitable combine. The bigger the profit margin, the less bankroll you need. (Also you need less bankroll the more the value is spread out among many items as opposed to the value being concentrated in one or two elite items.)

No I won’t tell you the item I found, but there are many profitable combines. Think about relatively cheap things that can turn into very valuable things, albeit at rare occurrence. This is where you will likely find profitable combines.

IRL I’m a professional gambler and have supported my family with it for over a decade.

Being a gambler, once I found out about the mystic forge mechanic, my interest was piqued. I had to figure out how to make money with it.

It took me about an hour of thinking and perusing the TP to find a profitable combine. I made some money with it.

Then I read all the consternation here on this forum about the MF mechanic and how much some people hate it. Thus this post. I want you to enjoy the MF mechanic, for it can be both fun and profitable. So I will explain how to make money with it (and ultimately make yourself a precursor if you so desire).

The MF works by converting an item (four at a time of course) into a random item. This random item is taken from a defined set of items. That is, if you put blue rings in, you don’t receive vicious fangs or leather trousers in return. You get either blue or green rings out.

The set of outputs is strictly defined. For a given set of inputs, you will receive an item randomly from a list of items, and you could write down every possible item on that list if you liked.

So that’s what I did. I picked an item on the trading post. Let’s call it Item A, and let’s say that Item A has a high buy order of 1s and a low sell order of 1s 50c.

I wrote down every single item that Item A could turn into in the MF. For the item I chose that I started making money with, this worked out to between 100-200 possibilities. Let’s say for the sake of argument, Item A can turn into one of 100 different items.

Now 50 of these possibilities will be one color, and 50 will be the next higher color. Let’s say Item A is a blue item. It can turn into one of 50 blue items, and also one of 50 green items.

Now I made an assumption (sometimes you gotta make these and see where they lead). I assumed that each of the 50 blue outputs was equally likely, and each of the 50 green outputs was equally likely. And that any given blue output is exactly 4 times as likely as any given green output. (I.e., 20% of the time on average you will receive a green back and 80% of the time a blue.)

Then I went to the TP and wrote down the sell price of all 100 items into a spreadsheet. For the item I chose, most of the 100 outputs were essentially junk. Let’s assume that all 50 possible blue outputs list for 1s and 1.5s on the TP and therefore will simply be fed back into the MF. Most of the green outputs were also junk. But a few of the green outputs had TP value, and a very few of the green outputs were quite valuable. Let’s say that the top ten valued green outputs were valued at:

6g
4g
3g
2g
1.6g
1g
1g
60s
40s
40s

All the other greens are worth 2s. And all the blues are worth the 1s you can buy them for on the TP.

Next step is to find the AVERAGE VALUE of the item you will get from the MP. You simply take a weighted average of the values of all the outputs (weighted by how likely they are—blues 4x more likely than greens). For these 100 items, the weighted average value of the outputs is 4s 56c. (If I did my math right. )

It costs 4s in buy orders to input into the MF, and for every 4s you input, you get an item back that will ON AVERAGE be worth 4s 56c.

Profit.

Well, not exactly, since the TP fees would eat you on this particular combine and make it slightly unprofitable.

But the combine I found was much better than this one. Instead of a 4s combine being worth 4.56s, it is worth more like 11s on average. Even after fees, it’s nearly 6 silver per click as fast as I can buy items off the TP and click them away. (Hint: It beats 2g per hour farming Cursed Shore.)

Also a tip. Look at the buy orders for all the intermediate crafting stuff like inscriptions, insignias, paddings, panels, hafts, hilts, blades, etc.

I regularly find such items with 300-500 buy orders on them that offer a profit over the mats. Did it with coarse trouser panels the other day. There were over 300 buy orders for the things that offered over a 20c profit after fees. So I bought as many mats as I could and pumped them out and filled the buy orders. Took maybe 10 min and it was over 60s profit.

Congrats. There are lots of crafting niches out there. Once you’ve found one you’ll find them more easily. IMO they follow patterns.

Another vote for sword/sword and greatsword at least until 40. Get sword mastery with your first 10 points, then illusionist celerity with the next 5. Get toughness gear so you can take more beatings.

Before I figured this out, I was getting downed and killed on my mesmer quite a bit. After I did I could chain pull/fight multiples and almost never get downed.