Curse

Chthon · Nov 08, 2007, 04:56 AM // 04:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Avarre

A power trader functions through the fact that any item has different worth to different people. Assuming they aren't preying on ignorance, there are always people willing to sell lower to get rid of an item faster, and, in other places, people who are trying to get an item and are willing to pay at the higher end of the spectrum to get it quicker.

This is fine, but...

Quote:

There are definitely cases where this may not be true, where ignorance is part of the deal

... this is what I tend to see in-game.

Of course, since I am only one person, and I don't frequent the trading districts unless I have business there, my observations could be skewed. However, I get the distinct impression that for every power merch who's out to save people time, for a price, there's a dozen who are out to trick people out of their gold.

Based on this observation, in my mind, the term "power merching" (or "power trading" or "power selling") is associated with the latter sort of activity, and not the former. Perhaps we would be well served to coin a new term to refer to one or the other so that we can distinguish what, say, Jetdoc is doing from what, say, Steph Fire Adept is doing...

kobey · Nov 08, 2007, 05:05 AM // 05:05

You are kinda correct to a certain extend

Eg. After the first few weeks of release NF, there are lots of WTB elemental Swords, Dead Swords and Colossal Scimitar. Yeah, many of them want them cos the skin is nice. But i dare to say that the majority of them wants to buy them for 5k off the ignorant and resell them for 100k +100ectos++

Ministry Of Peace · Nov 08, 2007, 07:32 AM // 07:32

If you ask me, buying something worth 100k+ for ~5k isn't power trading... it's just dumb luck. Dumb luck that you found someone ignorant enough to sell it for that. Call this scamming, lying, witholding information, call it what you will. This isn't power trading.

Someone posted a nice explanation of the profit from power trading being a payment for your time, which is very much correct. However, he also says that if it takes t amount of hours to sell something, the difference between the purchase price and the selling price must be equal to t * r, where "r" is the rate at which gold can be farmed conventionally. However, this is not necessarily true. Think for example, of wal-mart... Suppose the owner of a particular branch buys a shirt for $4, but said shirt takes 4 days to sell. Obviously, the owner of the store could have just gone to McDonalds, worked minimum wage for an hour, and earned the same amount. Yet owners of large corporations are among the highest earners in the United States. This is due to the volume of business that they conduct. While it may take as long as a month to sell any given item, you have a whole storage full of items available for trade, so you may be making a trade with a profit of ~5k every 5-10 minutes. Naturally, the higher volume of items you have for sale, the more likely at any given time you will have in stock what someone in any given area is looking for.

This means that sure, you need a lot of venture capital to start power trading, but it CAN still be quite lucrative, with even a modest initial investment. I personally started merchanting mods with ~10k a few months ago, and anyone that knows me in game or has seen my various sales in ventari's corner would know that my initial investment has grown slightly

While I am most certainly not the richest player in guild wars, I feel that I have done relatively well for myself since I began playing off-and-on this february.

A few tips:

1.) Make sure money doesn't go to waste. For a lot of players, as soon as they get money, it has a way of disappearing, without even really knowing where it went. Make sure that whenever you spend money, you are spending it for a reason. It can be surprising how fast money can pile up just from playing the game if you don't spend it on little things along the way.

2.) DO NOT buy elite armor. do NOT. There are several reasons for this. Elite armor has no liquidity whatsoever. This means you can never get back the money you invested in it. If you buy something else, a sword, a shield, those things may not be very liquid, but they still hold value. Armor does not. Furthermore, elite armors are not worth the amount you pay for them (with the possible exception of eotn armors). It used to be much much easier to farm gold, before loot scaling, which resulted in many many sets of elite armor being bought. Money for a set of elite armor could be farmed in an hour or two at trolls. The same amount of money at 5k per hour would take around 20 hours, after material cost. The gold cost of armor has not changed, but the time cost to get the armors has increased tenfold.

3.) Liquidity is very important, especially starting out. When you are starting out, small profits are ok, since you don't have an established stock, contacts, etc. In order to maximize profits, you need to be making these small profits quickly and consistently. When buying items to increase your stock, think about how much you are likely to make off an item, and how long it will take to sell. Buying a 20/20 sword mod for 10k and hoping to sell for 15k is much better than buying something like dwaynas grace for 20k, and hoping to sell for 25k (don't really keep up on prices for these items, this is just an example).

4.) Once you get established with a decent amount of money and stock, where do you go? You have to grow somewhere, or your profits will never really be substantially better than farming conventionally. Get an idea for what types of items people like to collect. Usually this is perfect uninscribable items of some sort, but it could be other things as well, for example req 8 gold max inscribable items. I personally collect shields with odd dual mods (eg +1/20 of caster attributes with +10 vs damage type as the other mod.. lemme know if you come across any of these, btw

). A lot of people collect perfect dual-modded shields. A few people might collect oddities (old 10/10 sundering mods, nerfed -3/10 shields). Others might collect ridiculously rare skins (swamp hammer ftw). Old skool staves that have an attribute linked to the hrt AND hrc. Max req 7's. The list goes on and on

try going to a guild wars wiki and just researching some of the things that have been taken out of the game, or things that are rare.

5.) Make friends with an established power trader. This is probably kind of obvious :P At the very least you have someone that can give you a second opinion on that thing you just THINK might be rare

FoxS · Nov 08, 2007, 05:27 PM // 17:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shakkara

Powersellers are the scum of the earth, as they inflate prices and live off other people's hard work while contributing nothing.

I spit on them.

What about the 55 bots?