Small Fraction of My PT Equipment

Last year I was in a car accident that changed my life forever. For six months I did physical therapy. Two steps forward, one step back. That was the pattern of my life. Drive an hour to work, eight hours there, one hour home, physical therapy for an hour, an hour at the gym, and then with barely any energy remaining I would try to pump out some blog posts. It was at the same time the most depressing and important part of my life. This was a form of imprisonment, or at least I thought at first. There were times when I felt giving up and accepting the pain would be a valid alternative to this prison.

But I didn't give up. I got stronger and I won; now I can run three miles no problem without pain. When I started I couldn't even lie down comfortably, let alone walk for a mile. If my back feels tight, then I can take it easy and stretch to relieve it. Every day I do some strengthening and continue my exercises, but I'm not chained to the same number of hours like I used to be.

At this point, you're probably wondering what the hell this has to do with Guild Wars 2. Well, I had very little time when it came to playing any games, and I blogged about several. My trick was to hyper focus on finding strategies that worked consistently without big time investments. Now that I have the time to play more, I can experience the more complicated methods that require a lot of market analysis. It was I who broke the news about low level armor to the community. Black Lion Profit expanded my ideas about flipping crafting materials (I'm not implying that I taught him because he learned it on his own, and did an amazing job explaining advanced flipping on the forums and later on his blog as well). And of course there were the bag opening experiments, mystic forge methods, salvaging ectos, great tp search criteria, and my all time favorite: flipping underwater weapons. That trading post podcast I recorded with the siege crew really did a nice job of summarizing my simplest tips.

All of these methods were learned because my time limits dictated that I should find these methods or fail miserably. So among the many things that I gained from half a year of hardship, were all these interesting strategies I probably would have missed out on or at least not been the first to recognize publicly.

When life gives you lemons, you learn to make lemonade. If you don't do this then you will live an unfulfilled and challenging life. Regardless of how much time you have on the trading post, there is room for you to succeed. Always evolve, always learn, and don't use this website as the only place you go to get tips.

Here are my favorite non-blog sites you can use to get news about this game. You can check my blog roll for the blogs I read if that's what you're looking for too. I have dug down into them to show you the places where I go for news and information.

http://www.mognation.com/podcast_podcasts/the-siege/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/search?q=gold&restrict_sr=on
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/search?q=farm&restrict_sr=on
http://www.goldwars2.com/news/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/48-community-news-projects/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/80-droknars-forge/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/

And of course my all time favorite: The Official XXXX is Spiking Hard Right Now thread on our private forums.

One of my favorite weapons to sell are spear guns, but really you can sell almost any underwater weapon for profit on the trading post. Players end up randomly needing to upgrade underwater weapons while leveling, and they usually need the upgrade because they just got smoked by something underwater. In their frustration, they buy out a really powerful underwater weapon and move on. What's powerful?

• Mighty
• of Force

At least at the lower levels, this is what I stick to. For higher levels, I just go with whichever weapons are most profitable.

I will buy a full stack of 250 of these bad boys and slowly sell them throughout the course of a week or possibly even longer. Leaving them up on the trading post and cancelling when I feel like it doesn't take up any of my bag space.

See if you can't find a low level underwater weapon worth selling. And remember, people will randomly buy new underwater weapons at EVERY level of the game, not just the first 10. Also, players will buy weaker weapons than the best version, such as a fine instead of a masterwork, because they are short on gold.

There's a lot more to what I blog about than just tips and hints towards making more gold. This blog is literally a fly zapper, attracting people who want instant profits and zapping them with reality. Sure, you can make 40-50 gold per day on the trading post, but only if you put the time into learning and experiencing this game within a game. So I hold out this promise like a bug zapper hangs in a tree. Flies come from all around, attracted to the light, only to be zapped and brought back to a painful reality.

Is my analogy a little extreme? Probably, but the truth is, I would never get your attention if I promised you "solid gold making strategies that take time to learn." People don't want to learn how to think about making gold, they just want to make gold. So I show them methods that work, sometimes based on time (speculation) and others based on small, consistent gains (like flipping crafting materials). These are my bug zappers. They are shiny, promise the world, and ground the people who are flying around looking for impossible "secrets to the trading post."

There are millions of people all playing on the same trading post. If you want to beat the masses, then you can't think like the masses. But the problem is, we all begin as a part of the hive mind. The moronic following of "secrets" in order to earn more gold usually leads to frustration and eventually wasting money on the trading post. So I use the terrible habit that we all begin with, and I zap you. I show you the truth: you can make plenty of gold once you learn how to think differently about the trading post. Understanding leads to insight, and that leads to profit.

Your first lesson: Think like a buyer.

What do they want?
Can you get it to them?
Will you make a profit?

ZAP! Welcome to the Guild Wars 2 Trading Post Blog and Gold Guide.

Someone spammed this blog with very angry comments claiming that I was trying to scam everyone with the Karka shell post. First of all, people who took my advice on the forums first and then the blog, had the potential to make a decent amount of gold. Obviously they had to buy and then sell their karka shells prior to the patch going live, but I did mention that when I blogged about it.

Several astute comments have mentioned that it might be wise to buy up shells now that they are so low, as this is potentially an over-reaction to the news. We don't know how many shells will be spent by each player and whether market supply will keep up with demand.

Remember my post on Azurite Speculating and how I talked about ways to avoid gambling? Well one person commented that they lost 60% of their gold from the Karka Shells!!! I appreciate your trust, but damn, I warned you all about over-speculating. How much money did I put into Karka Shells? Less than 1% of my total income. Just a few stacks is all.

Oh, btw, Azurite has been a serious money maker. So if you diversified into just Karka Shells and Azurite items you would have done just fine.

So please, complain to me so that I may better my blog, but don't accuse me of intentionally misleading anyone.

I understand that 99.99% of you have been extremely supportive and gracious towards my speculation posting, so this isn't really directed at you (the advice is, but not my complaint). Thank you!

PS: If you need help making gold and are lost, please listen to this podcast!

Podcast with Walk-through/Tutorial on Making Gold

Markco OUT!

Phil had a great comment yesterday, so let's bring it up as a discussion point for today's post.

"Hi Markco!

I have been reading you blog and learning a lot from it for about two weeks now. I have read most past entries and all the new ones that have come out since. I am having fun with the TP and also earned about 80 Gold so far from the 3 Gold I started with two weeks ago.
I am posting this because I am stuck in the exact same spot as the guy who mailed you and I do not quite understand your answer, I think.

How does selling things at a slower pace, bit by bit, accomplish faster profit? If I buy thousands of Grape pie fillings and relist them for a higher selling price they will get sold once all stacks posted before for the same price me are sold. Is it just because I will get undercut more often if I list bigger stacks? I am probably just missing something here.

Keep up the good work!
Cheers
Phil"

My response:

Let's say you get undercut by 10 people.

If you posted 10 auctions and they didn't sell, then you have to cancel 10 auctions to repost, right?

Well what happens when you list 250 auctions and 10 people undercut you?

You lose 5% of the cost to list ALL 250 auctions, instead of just 10.


Have any of you found the happy medium where you don't have to cancel a lot of auctions? I've found it to be mostly random, so it's best to avoid over-posting in all categories. Except for crafting materials, which sell so quickly it often doesn't matter.  But even then, 1000 of an item have far less chance to be undercut over the course of a day than 10,000.

Mike writes...

"Hi there, thanks for an awesome blog sacrificing your time to help out us! You have taught me so much!

I am just mystified as to how you manage to make 40gold from 50 gold per 1-2 days because the 'quick' flips you often talk about are failing miserably for me. I am diversifying my gold investments to TONNES of fine/masterwork low level armors, various vegetables and other crafting materials etc etc.

But after 24hours I havent even filled a quarter of those, and the ones I list become undercut in the next couple hours..

For example: buying 6,000 of a grape pie filling (or equivalent) for 10-20gold and then flipping it in the same day for a 2 gold profit is hardly making 50 gold a day :/ and that takes a considerably long time for those orders to be filled with everyone undercutting.. and all the while that gold could be invested elsewhere

Am I just being impatient or am I missing something?
Thanks again! Keep up the good work!"

Well, Mike, the nice thing is that you don't have to baby sit any of these auctions. Instead of posting the whole stack that you've collected, you could post a small amount each day. After a week you'd exhaust your stockpile and be able to place new buy orders. This strategy greatly reduces the amount of time you spend on the trading post each day and it's something I've recently gotten into. Give it a try! Place one big set of buy orders, leave them up for a few days, and at the same time only list a small portion of your auctions at a time. When you go to list each day, cancel anything that has been undercut too much.

This way you turn into a store kind of. Walmart doesn't sell all of their eggs in one day, but they keep a big stockpile in the back that they pull from whenever enough are purchased. Make sense?

Thank you Steve, it's people like you that give me the second wind I need to keep trucking along with all these games and strategies. Congratulations on your legendary!

For those who are struggling, definitely check out the latest podcast I did on The Siege!