Flipping volume low

[Crackers.9628]

3-4 years ago, I had 100 gold and tried some flipping. Clueless, I bought dyes and minis and at the end of the week I had 1k gold. I would list buy orders for 100 items first thing, then when I was done about 30-50 of those orders would be filled. It was a constant stream of items bought and sold. I honestly made between 100-200 gold per hour, starting with 100 gold. It was insane. I'd run around starter zones and would give out gold to anyone that asked.

However now whenever I list buy orders, they don't even get filled. Even mats are hard to come by. Has the player base decreased dramatically or something else?

[Ayrilana.1396]

What are you trying to sell? The game has changed a lot since 3-4 years ago.

[Donari.5237]

Actual TP experts can answer better than me, but I'll hazard a few possibilities.

• You lucked into a hot market back then. Everything I've seen about flipping says that you can't just do it with anything, you need to know what the trends are. Flippers are very cagey about letting anyone know what they're flipping, because as soon as the masses find out, they locust the item and supply and demand even out.
• Players have a lot more storage capacity now, and a lot more to make with the mats they do have. It's easier to hang onto mats, so why sell?
• Players are more savvy about listing as sell orders. If you say you'll buy mithril ore at 50c per, but the lower sell orders are at 1s or more (totally made up figures with no relation to reality), and mithril ore is moving at hundreds of thousands a minute, only the most clueless or uninterested will sell to the high bid rather than list and get double their profit in mere minutes.

[Crackers.9628]

@Donari.5237 said:Actual TP experts can answer better than me, but I'll hazard a few possibilities.

• You lucked into a hot market back then. Everything I've seen about flipping says that you can't just do it with anything, you need to know what the trends are. Flippers are very cagey about letting anyone know what they're flipping, because as soon as the masses find out, they locust the item and supply and demand even out.
• Players have a lot more storage capacity now, and a lot more to make with the mats they do have. It's easier to hang onto mats, so why sell?
• Players are more savvy about listing as sell orders. If you say you'll buy mithril ore at 50c per, but the lower sell orders are at 1s or more (totally made up figures with no relation to reality), and mithril ore is moving at hundreds of thousands a minute, only the most clueless or uninterested will sell to the high bid rather than list and get double their profit in mere minutes.

Shouldn't dyes and berserker gear always be a hot market?

[Crackers.9628]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:What are you trying to sell? The game has changed a lot since 3-4 years ago.

I'm curious what exactly has changed for this huge difference.

[Randulf.7614]

With craftable dyes and the advent of choosable ones for a characters anniversary, I'm not sure how much of a dye market exists beyond a select few

Berserkers is still desired, but given how easy T6 blood is to get now (all mats have become easier to get with improved drop rates in later maps), I'd have expected the price to drop.

Whether that is the right answer to those points, I don't know. It's for certain materials are massively easier to get than they were 3-4 years ago thanks to maps like Drizzlewood

[Donari.5237]

@Crackers.9628 said:

Shouldn't dyes and berserker gear always be a hot market?

Dyes coming in birthday presents have helped rein in prices. Also at some point dyes became salvageable for pigments used in guild hall decorations -- brown pigment seems the most valuable -- so if someone could sell a dye for under a silver, or get pigments to store for later use or sale, they might find it easier to salvage and deposit mats than to go through the TP interface for such a small listing.

So many better stats have become available that while berserker is still decent for the right power build (and condi builds became quite viable after a rework, lessening the demand for only berserker), it is extremely easy to do better. And again, with more room to store mats and more uses for those mats, players are probably salvaging rather than listing.

Like I said, flipping means knowing the ins and outs of the market. Paying heed to game changes that may affect fotm builds. Predicting what common material might become hot thanks to a new achieve or special item to make. It's way more work than I've ever cared to put in :)

[Zephire.8049]

@Donari.5237 said:

@Crackers.9628 said:

Shouldn't dyes and berserker gear always be a hot market?

Dyes coming in birthday presents have helped rein in prices. Also at some point dyes became salvageable for pigments used in guild hall decorations -- brown pigment seems the most valuable -- so if someone could sell a dye for under a silver, or get pigments to store for later use or sale, they might find it easier to salvage and deposit mats than to go through the TP interface for such a small listing.

So many better stats have become available that while berserker is still decent for the right power build (and condi builds became quite viable after a rework, lessening the demand for only berserker), it is extremely easy to do better. And again, with more room to store mats and more uses for those mats, players are probably salvaging rather than listing.

Like I said, flipping means knowing the ins and outs of the market. Paying heed to game changes that may affect fotm builds. Predicting what common material might become hot thanks to a new achieve or special item to make. It's way more work than I've ever cared to put in :)

Dyes also became account-wide instead of having to unlock them on each character, so that combined with the birthday dye packs means it's mostly new players buying the non-exclusive dyes and that's a slow market with very little, if any, profit. Even with exclusive dyes, between the birthday gifts and the BLC rotation of the kits, the demand for the most expensive ones has dropped and there's a certain volatility there. I ended up dropping dyes as something to flip just because there's a lot more research to turn a profit on those than I was willing to put into it.

Though to tack something on, pay attention to festivals for flipping things. Buy when they're cheapest in the year and sell when they're most in demand. For example, ToT bags and Wintersday presents spike right at the start of Halloween and Wintersday respectively but demand drops off after the first ~24 hours, and raw mats spike during the same timeframe of Four Winds.

But it really does require more research and effort now to make a quick profit than it used to. There's been years of not just the market maturing and stabilizing but years of people learning how the GW2 economy works, how to make money off it, and how to manipulate it to make money. Between TP flippers being secretive about what's profitable at the moment and flippers/TP barons periodically trying to create for a demand for something they bought up, it's actual work instead of buying unidentified dye and having a good chance to break even or make a profit on it.

[The Greyhawk.9107]

@Zephire.8049 said:Dyes also became account-wide instead of having to unlock them on each character,

OP said that they'd being doing these flips with dye three or four years ago, the change to dyes from character to account was almost six years ago.

[Danikat.8537]

Another thing to bear in mind is right now it's Wintersday and a lot of players are focusing on that and may not be doing as much other stuff, so it wouldn't surprise me if players are buying and selling fewer crafting materials than they normally would. Also the Drizzlewood Coast meta-event gives a lot of materials as rewards, which caused prices to drop and since the meta remained reasonably popular I doubt they're going to fully recover any time soon.

As other people have said making money flipping items in this game always requires some awareness of supply and demand - what are players doing and what do they need for it? Which of those items have (or could have) an easy suppy and which are harder to come by outside the TP? What's likely to change in the near future? For example crafting materials often go up in price around the time a new Living World episode comes out, because players anticipate that there will be new collections and items to craft which will increase demand (plus returning players crafting other stuff while they're playing the new story), but it's a gamble because a new episode could just as easily create an influx of new materials which drops the prices and then you're stuck facing a loss or holding onto stuff until the price recovers.

Sometimes unexpected changes can suddenly make a specific item extremely valuable; like when the Requiem armour set was released and the price of the Superior Sigil of Nulification jumped up from about 3s to around 12g. But it may not last, they were selling for half that 3 months later and a year on had dropped to under 1g. They've still worth about 30s each, so roughly 10 times what they were before, but not enough to make any signficant profit.

It absolutely can work, but it's a much more complicated process than picking an item you think might be popular, buying up however many you can afford and then selling them on for a profit.

[Veprovina.4876]

@Crackers.9628 said:

@"Donari.5237" said:Actual TP experts can answer better than me, but I'll hazard a few possibilities.

• You lucked into a hot market back then. Everything I've seen about flipping says that you can't just do it with anything, you need to know what the trends are. Flippers are very cagey about letting anyone know what they're flipping, because as soon as the masses find out, they locust the item and supply and demand even out.
• Players have a lot more storage capacity now, and a lot more to make with the mats they do have. It's easier to hang onto mats, so why sell?
• Players are more savvy about listing as sell orders. If you say you'll buy mithril ore at 50c per, but the lower sell orders are at 1s or more (totally made up figures with no relation to reality), and mithril ore is moving at hundreds of thousands a minute, only the most clueless or uninterested will sell to the high bid rather than list and get double their profit in mere minutes.

Shouldn't dyes and berserker gear always be a hot market?

Idk about dyes but there's a lot of basically free stat selectable armor and trinkets in the game now. Not many people are buying those on the TP, and no single stat combo is reall "hot items" today so maybe that's it. You could look at maybe some components for account bound stats like viper's or trailblazer's. Those items fetch a neat price, but again, it'll be hard to flip those. Epspecially since mats are way easier to get now.

[Ashen.2907]

@Crackers.9628 said:

@Donari.5237 said:Actual TP experts can answer better than me, but I'll hazard a few possibilities.

• You lucked into a hot market back then. Everything I've seen about flipping says that you can't just do it with anything, you need to know what the trends are. Flippers are very cagey about letting anyone know what they're flipping, because as soon as the masses find out, they locust the item and supply and demand even out.
• Players have a lot more storage capacity now, and a lot more to make with the mats they do have. It's easier to hang onto mats, so why sell?
• Players are more savvy about listing as sell orders. If you say you'll buy mithril ore at 50c per, but the lower sell orders are at 1s or more (totally made up figures with no relation to reality), and mithril ore is moving at hundreds of thousands a minute, only the most clueless or uninterested will sell to the high bid rather than list and get double their profit in mere minutes.

Shouldn't dyes and berserker gear always be a hot market?

Not if most players have unlocked those dyes and already have exotic, ascended, or even legendary gear.

[Danikat.8537]

I've also gotten the impression that more people are now aware of how equipment works in this game (like the fact that 'beserker's' isn't a specific set but a stat combination which is available on many pieces) and are aware of the advanced search options on the TP since the interface was re-done a few years ago, so the number of people simply searching for stuff with beserker's in the name has dropped and instead more people are buying cheaper pieces with the same stats but different names.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

If it would be easy to get 1k gold this way, everyone would do it, killing that market. So, you probably were lucky, finding a temporary hot market.

[Tzarakiel.7490]

The market was a lot more unstable back then. New items were added more often and people didn't want to wait for prices to drop. There were also patches and balance changes that changed the value of existing items.