GW's Rich And Famous

How do people in this game get so much money? oO

I personally have several stacks of zkeys/ectos pretty much always, so i am by no means poor. But i simply cannot get my head around how people can have like 20 stacks of armbraces and stuff like that.

I realise there was the duping scam several years ago, and not everyone got caught, so there are some super rich people left over from that, but how can anyone have so much money? There are simply not enough hours in the day to farm that much, and even the top pvp players earning stacks and stacks of zkeys every month from GvG, cannot even get close to some peoples level of wealth.

I simply just dont know how its possible, even if you farmed virtually non stop since the day the game was released, im not sure you could have accumulated the 100,000 ectos or whatever that some people seem to have these days.

Do people just buy there money online (against the EULA so plz dont do it)? or are they all ex dupe scammers..

Anyone got any ideas?
Note: please dont tell me how you earned 1000ectos or crap like that, im really only interested in the super super rich.

1. How do you know for sure there are super-rich people? Unless I'm being shown 7 stacks of armbraces in-game, I'll take any screenshot with a grain of salt.

2. Do you also stay awake at night thinking how Bill Gates has so much money? Why does it matter if some people have lots of money (in-game or otherwise)?

3. How familiar are you with the concept of "buying low, selling high"? I've seen my share of 1:20 deals and I only dabble in trading occasionally. People who do this all the time have ample opportunity to do even better.

you have several stacks of ecto's and zkeys, what do you want more?

A rich player talking about the super rich....lol, I am a poor player I have 3 ectos, 90k, and some shards, and I want GWAMM and I need loot for 3 money titles.... so as a poor player how do I strike it rich? what's the GW megamillion lottery?

You know these people have this many ectos/armbraces because of the prices of the super-rare Minipets that are constantly swapping hands.

Personally I think it was down to players constantly "flipping" purchases. Buying low, selling for less. Some players join games like these just to feel accomplished economically. What i'm surprised about was that with an economy largely dependent on non-cash trades (ectos mainly), they've only had to roll back the economy once when players decided to flood the market. Everyone was expecting it to happen again.

But to generate that many ectos and armbraces in the first place boggles my mind... Only Anet knows how nolife the community is.

2 words: Power Trade

If you go the hard route then if you farmed 5 hours/day for the past 3 years (doing a good farm) you would have made around 10 stacks of armbraces.

There's several ways to get filthy rich.
# concistently place top 8 in mATs, ATs & Snowball ATs
# place at the top of an art contest
# powertrade (this used to be very easy with the introduction of limited minis)
# speedclear UW
# speedclear DoA
# invested in items that will rise in value (made millions on party items before the title got introduced)
# buy gold on sites
# exploited the trader rollback
# dupe and not get caught
# hack people and steal their items
# HA, GvG, VQ, Mission services

And that's about it tbh?

This. Power trading makes more money faster than any other method I know. I have no figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if a dedicated power trader earned over 1k per minute on average, especially at the highest end trading where item prices are quoted in ambraces.

Agreed with the power trading method. I have no patience to do it for long periods of time like some people, but I have come away with making 100k in an hour with very little effort.
I can't even imagine the money that people get when they are good at it.

made 200k in 15minutes!! strong strong

Power trading gets money, but in most cases, it's just used an excuse by people to hide how they really got the amount of wealth they have. Also people seem to think powertrading is something "consistent". It's not. You could have 20 good deals one day netting you over 5M on that same day, but you could go weeks without making any profit.

Also, power trading is based of the fact that people are stupid (they don't know what something is worth) and that there is a way larger demand than supply. (So u can make big profit) With 6 years of GW under our belt, there is very few people left who allow for such powertrading to happen. Most people know what stuff is worth, and if not, they usually have friends/forums where they can find that information.

You'll also rarely ever find people who desperately need something and will severlely overpay for it, because the game is so old, and there's no need to "rush" things anymore.

Powertrading only works when the game promotes active game play. For those confused, GW does not, as it does not have much of an end-game, unlike Runescape or WoW for example. (Where there's always a MASSIVE demand for certain items)

AFAIK, there was/is still an exploit which enables you to get about 1K zkeys an hour (way more if you finetune it, just giving a rough baseline to give you an idea). There also have been several people who have acounts filled with duped armbraces/ectos and shit, but alot of them left GW. (Altough I'm fairly sure alot of them sold their shit on blackmarket forums for tons and tons of real life cash)

There's obviously also legit ways of getting filthy rich, as pointed out above, but the richest people in Guild Wars did not get there through one of these way, you can be sure of that.

I am certainly in this camp, it takes real effort to earn the cash to buy elite armour etc. I am just amazed and a little in awe of the time and effort some must put in.

This is what i can confirm,its my screens of trades(tho sin's is an frend of my)

1,000 armbraces +the ammount of minis he/she showed(and the ones he/she claimed to have)... theres no way that he/she got that via trading, though that was what he/she claimed.

Does that guy have a life ?

ah, U told me bout it like a while ago.
Guess anet didn't catch em.

There once was a poor family
The Mother was poor the Father was poor and the Children were poor.

What's more even the Butler Chauffer Housekeeper Maids Footmen and Gardeners were poor.

Nothing whatever to do with the thread except to show that being poor or rich is relative.

There are a lot of legitimately wealthy players out there, some not so much. It's been known for a long time that not everyone who should have been banned for the dupe lost all their items/accounts. All things considered Anet was a hell of a lot more harsh for the developer outpost exploit at Mallyx than they ever were for the trade window/disconnect problem (both of these were fixed afaik and are documented so don't flip out mods). It's wrong to assume every time you see a 'rich' player they are a cheater...the screens above however imo are awfully suspect.

How ppl fail to understand how things work in gw at times amazes me more than someone showing a few stacks of ambraces.
I do know a member of my alliance who in a very weird way ( i fail to understand myself why he plays gw ) has done all campaigns with help - they actually now just trade away the hrs.From what i was told they started with a few k and worked their way upwards - when they hit a set amount they convert to ectos/ambraces and restart from the bottom ( and it seems they actually enjoy this ).Now this may sound so amazing its bull but think of the real world where we have ppl selling real estates/stockmarket running etc and to us thats normal.
If you had say 4-5 hrs daily free you could with almost no money at start farm the conset materials and build up a massive stock ( myself i aim for a casual 100 - casual as i dont do it daily but when i can be bothered ) and then with a few hundred consets visit toa.You have 2 - 3 types of buyers , basic buyers who buy single amounts and pay cash.Next is the buyers who buy say 10 at a time and pays cash/ectos and finally you have the sc addicts who will buy in bulk - 10 upwards and usually pay most in ectos and the diff in cash.
This isnt a uber secret as its in plain view for all to see and all the ectos i made in last year were from conset selling and nothing else - i cba with trying to farm high end weapons or trying to sell them for ages in outpost - consets sell easier.
Some players actually farm doa for gems and turn them into ambraces or sell gems - ask the doa farmers how it works and if ( its said somewhere ) doa can net 70 - 100k a run easily ( unsure of run times so not stating ) plus any gems and it all adds up after a few daily runs.
As for players after elite armor - its not a secret that money is so easy to gain , again with a bit of effort any player with either eotn an all campaigns or just factions can make money easily.All campaigns + eotn means a lil work on titles and getting enough materials for consets , the factions only player ( could state prophs with caromi but its slower than sensali in factions ) could just farm stacks of feathers and sell - never seems to be a shortage of "wtb feathers" in the main outposts.
It reminds me of a new player we had in guild around a yr ago - played for a month before joining and was shown feather farming ( they cba to farm the rest of the mats for consets ) and within a few days the newbie was making money and reached 100k mark and was like a man with his first ever paycheck - wasnt till he was showed 100 consets did he understand rich in gw doesnt mean 100k or 1000k but anything higher than that by maybe 2 or 3x.
100k may seem a lot of cash untill you actually see how easy it is to go past that and upwards and suddenly 100k for an item doesnt seem a huge amount taken from your balance.
On a twisted end note - imagine being able to see exactly how much cash your h/h has earned during your gw time would probably blow us away - dunkoro would pwn bill gates fortune easily lol

ahh the good old days URSAN groups in DOA was where it was at and also BOTS and multiple accounts are just a few other ways and we are all going to start at ZERO when GW2 comes out

You already know. People sit in Kamadan all day and "flip" rare miniatures and other useless albeit highly valuable items. Either that or they happened to get a Kanaxai and sat on it for years.

I've never had more than a stack. It gets kind of boring.

To everyone who suggests farming: PLEASE. If you got extremely lucky you might make 100k in an hour. Typical pvx solo farm is only like 15-30k/h. I don't know about speed clears, but I can't imagine it being over 100k. Doing single item trade with lower-end items will easily yield more per hour than the typical solo farm. Several times per week, I get deals that equal several dozen ecto. It just takes time and patience.