Gaming: Guild Wars 2, Income, and Crafting

In my last article, I discussed some of the economic theory that relates to the market system in Guild Wars 2.  Now I'm going to discuss some of the economic realities, relate them back to the theory, and provide some concrete examples of how you can make a fairly steady stream of income in the game.

Keep in mind that these techniques will often work for any game with a system similar to the one in GW2.

Flipping

A fairly well known method of making constant, steady income that revolves around exploiting the bid system in GW2.

How do you do it?

When you go to buy something, you can either match the price listed by the lowest seller or place a custom offer. If you take the time to place a custom offer, the price is almost always lower.


In general, you always want to place custom offers for any good that you do not want immediately, even if the difference between placing one and waiting compared to simply matching the price of the lowest seller seems small. This money will add up.

An opportunity to flip for profit occurs when the difference between the price listed by the lowest seller and the price listed by the highest buyer is greater than 15% of the lowest seller's price.

Why 15%? Because that's the cost of a transaction in the Trading Post. You cannot make money simply by buying things at a slightly lower price and selling them at a slightly higher price because of this fee.

Seems pretty easy, right? Now all you need to do is identify a few products and/or markets where you can consistently perform this trick. Below, I'm going to list a few examples of why products - or even whole swaths of similar products - often end up with this rather wide buy/sell margin, as well as give some solid examples.

1) Gathered crafting materials. These are gathered passively by many players, but not all can use them. Those that can't tend to dump at low prices, while those who can tend to buy at higher prices. Some extremely rare crafting materials are good for this, i.e. Onyx Shards and Charged Shards, but there are good examples of simpler materials that can also yield good profit over many transactions, i.e. Bay Leaves.

2) Items crafted for experience only. There are many sorts of items that are crafted primarily to get experience and move up to crafting better and better items. These tend to get dumped to the market at low prices by people who don't care about returns, allowing you to pick them up low and sell them high. There are not many good, consistent examples of this that I know of, but if you filter down to a subset of all armor/weapons/trinkets you should be able to find some by checking the prices.

3) Items useful for low level characters with lots of money. Imaging you're level 80 and are just starting a new character. Money is no object - you want the best gear possible for your first 10-20 levels, and since the costs are so low compared to how much money you should have available at level 80, you're more interested in acquiring the gear quickly than cheaply. My personal favorite flipping market exists because of a combination of this and the previous point. I won't tell you what it is, because it might spoil my fun, but I will direct you towards the level 14 Mighty Amulet as a consistent, steady way of flipping for money - they usually buy for between 6 and 7 silver and sell for between 9 and 10 silver.

There are, of course, other reasons such markets exist, but for me, these are the big three. If I'm ever thinking about looking into flipping in a specific set of goods, if it fits one or more of these conditions I'm fairly confident I can find at least a handful of good opportunities.

Of course, it's possible to simply do a little research on your own and find some of the best items to flip as of the current time. For that, you can go straight to here and, while it will not always have the best items to flip on the top of the list because there is no measure of turnover, you should be able to find some good opportunities.

Flipping Via Salvaging and Crafting

While essentially the same concept, this idea merits special mention because of the extra effort and, as such, extra opportunities that arise from it.

To do this, you need a good grasp of what the ingredients are to craft most things, as well as what you get when you salvage them - both with the most basic kits and the most expensive ones. You'll also need a character capable of crafting whatever it is you are looking at - preferably you will have someone with 400 in every discipline, but it is probably more reasonable to have people up in the 200 area and look mostly at mid-range goods.

You can fairly easily make a profit here by taking into account things that other people don't. For instance, there were a few days only last week where Iron Ore was being bought at 8 copper apiece and Steel Ingots were selling for 50 copper apiece. Making one Steel Ingot required three Iron Ore at 8 copper and one Lump of Coal at 16 copper - a total of 40 copper, leaving you with a profit of 2 copper per Steel Ingot.

I personally used this trick to make about 3 gold before it disappeared into the ether.

A similar method involving the highest tier of Salvaging Kits also emerges when looking at rare weapons with a level requirement of 69 or above. When salvaging these weapons, you have a fair chance of grabbing between one and three globs of ectoplasm - worth about 25 silver each. If you can find a weapon of this sort selling at around 20 silver pieces, you can easily make a lot of money by buying and salvaging the weapons.

There aren't any real cut-and-dry areas where this works well, but it's usually worthwhile to take a look at the costs of intermediate goods and raw materials. There is often a cost discrepancy worth exploiting - one that is created by a combination of imperfect information and people not wishing to take the time to craft the intermediate material themselves, probably because it is just under experience range for them.

Sell, Sell, Sell

This method is a little bit less of a way of generating money from money, and more a way of generating money from your other activities.

Whenever your pack is full and your wandering around during PvE, don't start destroying or salvaging things quite yet. Just open the Trading Post and start posting goods inbetween fights. You'll make a pretty decent chunk of change just by doing so, and you can practice always remembering to place bids or offers rather than matching bids or offers.

This method is especially useful for people who are just starting out, as you tend to have low inventory space.

Turning Karma Into Money

Karma is one of several secondary currencies in GW2. If you are not hoarding karma to make, say, a legendary weapon, you're probably going to be much happier turning that karma into money to buy things than saving it and using it to purchase mostly substandard karma gear.

So, what's the most efficient way to turn karma into money? Dyes, my friend. Dyes.

To craft the most expensive dyes, you will need to have a level 400 chef and plenty of karma on that character. You can use the karma to purchase huge amounts of black beans from one of several karma merchants that sell them (information on that here).

Assuming you have all the black beans you could ever want, Unidentified Gray Dye (Rare) sells for a surplus of one gold on the market after subtracting the costs of raw materials and the transaction fee.

When all is said and done, you get a conversion rate of about 490 karma to one gold, which is pretty damn good. If any of you know a better method of moving between the two, I'd love to hear it, but as far as I know this is the best way.


And now I'm done. Hopefully some of you enjoyed this and learned a little bit about how to make a quick and easy buck in GW2. As always, you can follow over on the right and comments are always welcome - particularly if you can think of a better way to convert karma into money. I'm always wondering about that.