Slowly but surely money sinks have been added to Guild Wars. Making money pretty important, especially in lower levels where everything is ruinously expensive. That means gaining and making money is going to be a pretty important activity at least until you've played for a while and are stacking up your wealth in big piles. Finding ways of making the most out of your wealth is going to be pretty crucial. Sure, you can get by without worrying about it but if you want to have the latest and best armor and skills and weapons and dye your armor and get that guild hall and pay the WaW fee and everythign else, getting ahead of the wealth by level curve, so to speak, will do you some good.
So, finding those "exploits" where you can get around a money sink or can sell something at a significant profit is a worthwhile activity. You'll have a lot of wealth as a character, you'll be wearing expensive armor, collecting the valuable materials to craft them, learning expensive skills, holding expensive weapons, and more beyond just hording gold. The way to get ahead through wealth is to make sure that it's liquid. That you can turn your gold into crafting materials to craft a new set of armor, for example, is a common practice. But let's say you have no gold but instead have a pile of crafting goods - wood, let's say, but you're a Warrior and you need Iron to craft your suit. You can sell off all that wood to the crafting merchant and use the money to buy iron while setting some gold aside for the crafting fee and then you can craft your armor. You've converted one resource, your wood, into several others, and that, in essence, is liquid wealth. The problem here, though, is that you have gold sinks. Unless you can find someone willing to make a trade you're not going to get the actual value on that wood, so you'll lose some of your wealth converting it to gold. Then there's a premium on crafting material prices so you'll lose yet more wealth buying up iron. And again, you'll lose wealth as you craft that set of armor - it's still valuable, it's just very hard to liquidate it and realize its worth. The game's full of little snares and traps like that which will siphon off your wealth and, therefore, keep people from building up too much wealth and ruining the economy for the rest of us. That's the theory, anyway.
Making the most of your wealth, then, involves "beating" or "exploiting" those money sinks. It can be as simple as finding someone to trade with. If you can find someone willing to trade you, say, 3 Iron for 1 Wood you'll be making a good profit - instead of losing wealth on the deal you'll gain it. You'll also be fleecing that poor sap but, hey, that's capitalism. Or, say iron and wood are about equal in value you can find someone to just trade you straight up for it. That means that rather than losing wealth or gaining wealth you're just transfering your wealth from one form to another. Better yet, GW is a complex game with a lot of interlocking parts, there may be ways out there to get around the normal gold sinks by knowing, in so many words, the right place to shop. Let's say the crafting merchant will only give you half value on all your wood planks. But if there's another merchant out there they might give you full value. You can sell your wood there and then head to the crafting merchant to pick up your iron and avoid losing some of your wealth to the crafting merchant's overhead. That's an example and one that won't work but if you want to make the most of your money you'll be looking out for ways of "tricking" the game into giving you the most for your goods.
Here's a real example, one I found last BWE. Thanks to belts and bags now being inventory items you can sell them off. In Pre-Searing Ascalon there are collectors that will give you a belt pouch which you can sell for 50 gold each and every time you bring them 5 of a certain item dropped by a specific monster. Those drops are either Skale Fins or Worn Belts. Normally those sell for 2~3 gold each. So, by turning 5 of them into a belt pouch and selling it off you raise the value of each drop to a full 10 gold, which is a pretty good drop for the level of monsters you'll be fighting. Better yet, the collector who wants Worn Belts is right near an Outfitter who'll buy you pouches as well as near a large grouping of the monsters that drop Worn Belts, Bandits. They're all around Ashford which is near to Ashford Abbey, another zone. You can clean out the Bandits, scoop up several belts as well as the gold and other items they'll drop, head to the collector, trade you belts in for pouches, head to the Outfitter, collect 50 gold for each, zone out and repeat. In rapid order you'll have enough money to afford an ID kit and those monsters also drop a high percentage of "precious" items which will also sell for 50G each once you identify them. An ID kit costs 100G and has 25 charges so each charge is worth about 4G to you. Find two or three precious items - pretty good odds since you have 25 chances - and you've just paid for your ID kit. Before too long you'll be able to have a platinum piece or two, more than enough to afford salvage kits to get the crafting materials for your first crafted set of armor (Salvage kits cost 100G, too, and in Pre-Searing you won't get more than 1 or 2 crafting goods from a salvage unless it's a "highly salvagable" item. That's barely worth it. So it's better to hold off on Salvage kits until you're out of the academy and are doing missions with higher leveled monsters). You can do similarly with farming Skales for Skale Fins.
It takes a bit of time and effort but it allows you to get better equipment earlier, giving you a not insignificant edge.
-thats ingenius.the concept is right infront of everyone, but you just dont see it, til someone else explains it.hehe.good one.
Farming those worn belts should bring in some nice cash to start post-searing.
No one ever killed anything with a cape.