0_o... is there something going on that I should know..? Weird offers for my beetle..

Alright, yesterday I was taking offers on my mini beetle, and got the usual "10k, ok?" and all that jazz..
then someone PM'd me offering 650e which was on the lower end, but still reasonable... when I said I would not do it immediately and merely consider his offer he immediately bumps his offer up to 13 armbraces, then he ups it to 1000e+3 armbraces......

I think to myself... "wow... why is he offering so much"... but I tell him I need to think about it and PM him later in the day.

Later that day someone else PM's me offering 1200e....... and I'm like 0_o... what's going on here...?

Then after -that- someone else PM's me offering 1400e...

NOTE: All these people are asking me to sell it to them asap... which can be understandable... but its also rather discomforting...


AFTER all of that, the original person who offered 1000e+3 armbraces PM's me about 10 hours later saying: 25 armbraces (2,125 ectos) if you trade now


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Am I missing something here? Can somebody please tell me what's up?

my guess: they want to scam you.

i think they guess that if they keep upping the offer, u would get excited and accept before looking at the real offer

My original thought was that they just wanted to get rid of ebay gold asap, but I'm sure they would have found other people willing to sell by now 0_o...
Maybe that's just me being paranoid.

Always be wary of people that tell you "trade quick ok? I gotta go." and the like. 9/10 times they are scammers trying to trick you out of something, so watch what they do carefully.

..Wow. Had no idea it was that much.. if i was you i would have snatched that offer in a heartbeat, Oh well.

That would be a couple hundred dollars worth of gold. :S

probably because GWEN is coming out soon along with the Hall of Monuments. I've been getting some pretty high offers on my own minis (10k+ ectos each for mini kanaxai and panda). higher offers have still been coming in so we'll see what they go up to.

Maybe the folks who actually have 1000+ ectos to spend on something have seen the writing on the wall and know that with global favor the ecto price will drop into the 2k range before long.

haha, I wouldn't doubt that, however, one guy offered me 25 armbraces...... a really 'out-there' offer... 0_o...

keep the beetle imo

I'm still pissed that Anet hasn't made these beetles more common. I want one bad.

Keep the beetle. Few of them has it. And everyone has ectos/money/armbraces, it's just the question how many. I wouldn't sell it.

i would definitely take the ectos and vambraces or whatever...

think about it.
having a huge stack of money. (or a bunch of huge stacks!) right before GWEN. you can get anything you want basically. get some really nice weapons and armor.

or would you rather have a little beatle following you around?
kuunavang is much cooler.
and you'll probably forget it's in your inventory sometimes and not even take it out.

that's just my opinion.
and hey! maybe if you end up selling for 245+ vambraces you'll sling me one

IGN's on the side if you felt the sudden urge to be nice to somebody =)

Aren't there only like hundred of those around? If I had one, I wouldn't sell it for much less than what they offered.

Why is everyone saying omg scam?


Heres the reason right here...

If some idiot is dumb enought to offer so much take it.

They will only go down in price.

I will never sell my Kuunavang. And if I ever had a beetle, I'd definitely never sell that either. Why? Well, Kuunavang is my favourite mini pet. But not only that: The Hall of Monuments. Rewards in Guild Wars 2 for pets in Guild Wars 1. Keep it.

OP: IMO either a scam or gold buyers. They could have been someone who sold their mini pet for a huge amount of gold and wanted a beetle really bad though....

Mini pets are hugely inflated now.

There was a time when the wealthiest players in GW were known to each other and those who collected items. 1750 Ecto which was a maxed out trade window was something not many people had done.

Now however, there are dozens and dozens of completely random people with thousands and thousands of ecto.

Lets face it there is no way they farmed all of that as farming is time consuming and not the best way to make large amounts of gold.

If they power traded it they wouldnt be complete randoms as well power traders are usually known to each other.

Maybe they bought their mini pet cheap and sold it for a rediculous amount to someone who bought gold. However, this would not account for the huge amount of people with insane amount of gold e.g. 80 million +

I always thought the gold buying problem wasnt that big of a problem. However, with mini pets it seems it has got a lot lot worse.

I really hope Anet implement some way of catching the big gold buyers as they are the ones screwing up the mini pet market.

Thank God the gold buyers have not infested the item market. A guildie said it was most probably because they were too stupid and could not track down the rare items hence why they collect mini pets where the owners are usually known. Kinda makes sense lol.

Armbraces are what have caused the huge inflation. Before 1750 ecto was the max someone could offer now they can offer 70 ecto armbraces. This has encouraged people to buy gold and as more people buy gold others buy more to outbid the ones who bought a lesser amount. Thus creating Credit Card Wars.

And to think all those massive prices are over mini pets which I would not consider rare. Kanaxi and Vizu are the only two exception. To think the Panda which numbers over a hundred can fetch 80 million gold is crazy. Heck back in the day an R8 15>50 Crystalline sword was lucky to hit 20 million and that numbers only a dozen or so. There are items which are virtually one off yet barely clear one million gold.

I find it most amusing how Anet screwed the ultra high end Guild Wars item market up in an attempt to reduce the amount of gold in GW and reduce gold buyers. They then add mini pets and the number of big gold buyers is higher than I have ever seen and they are buying the biggest amounts of gold I have seen too.

They ought to just give every player a complete set of minipets on their character's birthday and call it good. If you don't want them, release them back into the wild (i.e. drop them in an explorable area and zone out).

There are enough "prestige" items out there to satisfy people e-peens, minipets shouldn't be turned into little cult objects.

To what a prior poster said about the inflation, it is still very true. With gold dropping less and less, now guild wars is split into those who have gold saved from farming in the old days when it was well worth it, or power trading, and those who can't hope to afford 15k armor now.

Now people see all this cool stuff they want, but prices are still sky high on trades, they go off and ebay gold or whatever to catch up. Ironically, ANET is even making the gold farmers more cash since with the nerfs they can now charge more.

The loot scale changes definitely hurt the economy bad. Hopefully Gwen will see these go away.

I still wonder though if ANET supports the bots in a way. Each bot that comes into the game brings with it cash. I do not buy all this, they are on stolen accounts, or they are on free trials [which IIRC you cannot trade stuff from] because since ANET's only way to combat bots is to change the game, most of the farmers will profit long before ANET bans their account.

There is no scam here, as you may have already realized. People have hit it spot on, its ebayed inflation. That and collectors beginning to hang on to the rare minis. You have to realize this hypothetical situation (I know some numbers are wrong):

100 mini beetles to begin with (some have been reported to be deleted, which I personally dont believe, but thats a different story)

lets say 20 people want to keep theirs, that makes 80

80 people sell theirs for (back in the day, when they first came out) 100 ectos

demand starts to go up, as people realize they can't get one of these for 100 ectos, as they were already sold

Ascalon id1 "WTB mini roller beetle, 150 ectos"

rinse and repeat all the while removing some from the market when a collector gets one.

Now you're down to 20 MAX rollerbeetles that would POSSIBLY be sold, as the rest are tight in collector hands. These 20 will not go for a small amount either, thats why people were offering you so much for it.

The worst thing is that it was done in the past 3 weeks from a few random names that nobody knows that MOST LIKELY bought all theri gold off ebay, who knows, they might be legit, but I doubt it.

As someone said above, they didn't think the gold selling online was that bad, same here, I really didn't have a problem with it, sure it helps someone get theri 15k armor, or a fancy new sword, it didn't bothe rme at all. But when you see people with enough in game money to buy a CAR (80 million is about 4,000 american dollars) it makes you say "huh"

Dont get rid of the bots anet! I love playing dodge the bot in Altrumn Ruins

All I would like to know is the name of the fool who even made these mini-pets "trade-eligible" in the first place.

Anet have seriously seriously messed up in my honest opinion.

They destroyed the high high end item market and have introduced an even higher unobtainable to legitimate players market.

You see people winging 24/7 that they cannot obtain that perfect Crystalline sword and how unfair it is. Complaining at how unobtainable a few hundred ecto is. Now we see mini pets for in the region of ten thousand ecto.

I have no problem with rare items or mini pets. I have no problem with inflation occuring through the items or mini pets desirability. I do however, have a massive problem with things becoming so heavily inflated due to a couple of dozen hardcore gold buyers that cause the said things to no longer become available to legitimate players.

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Please note there are exception to the above e.g. people who had Kanaxi and Panda and sold one for 80 million gold thus allowing them to have alot of gold to play around with. Where that example of 80 million gold came from in order to buy the mini pet I have a problem with.

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Anet need to seriously look at their mini pet policy as the whole gold buying situation is crazy. Maybe they have an "interest" in it which would explain why people are able to obtain such huge quantities of gold without getting banned.

If not it really does not send a good signal to the community. If a player can purchase tens of millions of gold and not get banned then purchasing a few million gold will clearly not result in a ban.

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Actually, everything was fine with the hyper-rare minipets until the announcement regarding the Hall of Monuments. If you kept track of prices (as I did), the inflation in price earlier in year largely mirrored the devaluation of the ecto following loot scaling.

Let's face it, making it such that the minipet is potentially 'transferrable' in some way to the next game (and it will be just as exclusive there as here) makes having one a lot more attractive. Combine that with the fact that it's possible to have crazy amounts of cash (the game's been running for 2 years) and you get crazy prices. This is independent of the gold-buying problem.

(Yes, I am familiar with the story of the Kanaxai that was sold to the gold-buyer and what was paid for it. That person ultimately is not the problem; these minis are both scarce and in demand and apparently the prices are correcting to the proper market values. The gold-buyer here is the mechanism by which the price corrects; it would have happened anyway, however. Just not as fast.)

Buying gold permits people to amass large concentrations of wealth much more rapidly than they normally should; I see how you would believe that their current effect on prices is limiting the items' availability from "legitimate" players. But let's be honest: you didn't get the 20 million you needed before the price correction to buy a Kanaxai by playing normally. Most of the major concentrations of wealth in the game have been amassed in the last year or so; generally they've been put together by hardcore traders. I've done my fair share of trading (see avatar); those guys can have it. Not that it isn't profitable, just that it's boring.

At the end of the day - if you want to lay blame for the current price situation on minis, it goes to two places. Domain of Anguish and Hard Mode. Both are very popular additions to the game; both make it very possible to accumulate a lot of wealth on a single account. That's driving the problem; the AMOUNT of gold people are buying is a symptom of the problems caused by those changes.

one reason why I absolutely hate trading in game.

Most people pm you after seeing the WTB in party search. They wont tell you the price because they are trying to get you to pay over what they want for the item.
I was told 100k+150e for a req 9 tact emblazoned defender.... wtf.

I have a feeling that the minipet market isn't being driven by ebay gold, but by the huge stockpiles of wealth accumulated by power trading early on in the game; those players tend to correlate very well with the hardcore collector demographic that rare minipets would appeal to.

Ok... all this is going to force Anet to really ad any kind of limit to trades.... and that is something must of us do not want.

Now we see something. Before the hall of monument,s pets were just for show... so no need to give huge ammounts... now that they will unlock something, those Botters, Ebayers, Bug/Glitch abusers or whatever they are are revealing themselves.

If things keep like that, the possible solutions would be something that many will find very bad, imagine this:
- Being imposible to trade items for items, just gold for items or items for nothing.
- Limit stacks of the same item that can be traded.
- Impossibility to trade value:0 items or certain items.
- Imposibility to trade items that are managed with traders.

And so...

Trade in GW is doomed unless they really fix the 'babel tower sympthom' that makes some fool want to get Ebay gold.
Something must be added to freeze and decrease prices when they go over certain amounts.

It isnt known at all if having a pet in your storage/inventory is 'unlocking' anything for HoM. Perhaps you would require to actually receive the present from anet/unwrap it yourself..

i can see it now, wtb wrapped b/d present, 1000 armbraces. ^^

Im sure its possible to gather alot of money by power trading though, myself made over 300k within 2 weeks by a bit of farming and buying/selling gemsets.
... but multiple armbraces %)

Hard mode came alongside loot scaling which reduced people's raw gold income from drops quite significantly. At the same time people are earning more from missions and bonus mission successes meaning that the 'normal' player won't be so affected. Gems, however expensive they are, do not bring gold in to the economy because they have no value except what other player are prepared to pay for them. As a result DoA only transfers funds from player-to-player instead of injecting gold in the circular flow of income.

I agree that many players got rich from DoA but only because of other people's willingness to pay for gems and armbraces.

Ebay gold is large cash injections.

i posted up in the trade search that i was selling a mini kanaxai for 50k ectos and immediately got quite a few offers. i wasn't even planning on selling my kanaxai; just wanted to see the offers and i was kind of surprised i got that many that fast.

So here is the 50 million gold question. If you sell you mini and get your 50 mil equivalence's does ANET ban you for selling items to EBAY gold sellers? They have done so in the past even to people who did not know they did so.

There is an old saying I think applies...

"If its too good to be true it just might be."

We're looking into the possibility that a display error is present that would make these offers more scam than a legitimate offer or proof that someone has almost unbelievable wealth. (Thread on that subject here.)

We'll let you know what we find out.

um, i have a question. first a caveat; i have been playing since may '05, but i haven't ever been interested in large scale trades. that being said, how is it possible to trade 50,000ectos? if a stack is 250, 4 stacks is 1,000, it would take 200 stacks, right? or can ectos stack higher than 250...

like i said, i don't mean to be dumb; i just have never tried to gain that much wealth.

I really really hate to start correcting people and stuff but it has to be done.

If you made alot of gold e.g. tens of millions you either bought it or power traded it.

If you power traded it you would be known to other power traders. There is no way you could accumulate so much gold and not be famous within the power trading community. You cant make thousands upon thousands of ecto on the sly. I have dozens of power trading friends and we are always gossiping about who has what wealth, who got hacked, who bought what gold, who got banned, who bought what item, who joined what guild etc. Its as simple as that and I really hate to be arrogant now, if I dont know you then you didnt make those tens of millions of gold power trading.

The golden age of power trading was back in 2005/Early 2006. Every gold item was worth something there was what seemed like alot of ebayers and insanely wealthy people. Even all the big ebayers were known in the item collecting community.

Power trading recently could not allow you to accumulate tens of millions of gold. It would have had to have been made along while ago. All the big time power traders from back then who can be the only people with tens of millions of gold no longer play. I can think of only a few people who still play from back in the day but they no longer have the kind of wealth they once did.

Basically what I am getting at is, the people able to pay tens of millions of gold for mini pets now could have only made it legitimately from power trading and as I dont know them and every insanely wealthy power trader has quit GW, I can only conclude and conclude safely they did not make it power trading. Whats left? Buying it.

All the old school players have quit. Even back in the day 20 million was the highest amount anyone had and all of those players bar one have quit. The wealth isnt coming from old school players.

Not the amount some people are throwing around now. Like I have mentioned before aside from a few people not capable of fronting the kind of gold required no old school power traders are left. Back in the day 100k per day was a respectable amount to make. And lets put it this way I have no way near enough to buy either a panda or a kanaxi.

And to add further support to the gold buying argument. Most of what is left of the power trading community dont give a shit about mini pets and would rather leave them to the gold buyers to fight amongst themselves over.

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The only execption to the above is someone who sold their mini pet for a silly amount of gold and has a huge amount of gold as a result.

Armbraces are worth 70 ecto each at the moment and are stackable.

No, someone obtained through a trade 80 million gold well the equivalent in armbraces in my alliance and showed it to several people.

Please do something Anet about gold buyers. It cant be that hard to catch someone repeatedly getting huge amounts of gold.

It seems you have a different perception of merchanting than me..although its very hard to decipher from your descriptions what exactly "power trading" is. From my merchanting experience in this game and other games, I would somewhat haggle and "manipulate", (dare I use the word ) into paying a bit more or selling for a bit less of a certain item. Sort of like a used car salesman lol, although that would be down-grading what I and some of my friends did.

But other than that method, I don't quite see inner-circle trading of some sort (as you refer to it as), as a real way to make money.

Please care to elaborate to a confused GwG user.

Would somebody really pay that much money for fictional currency to increase their fictional reputation in a fictional world?

Who made 80mill?

You guyz might want to be aware of something very disturbing going on:

It seems that some player(s) found a way to accumulated massive amounts of wealth and want to invest them in rare mini pets...

Here are two links to threads making this problem public:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10186091

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10186087

I was shocked!

All i ever got are those darn Elixirs of Valor lol and those guy(z) have like 1000 Armbraces ?? maybe even more ??

Gaile, Andrew, Anet Devs... do something and plz let us know.

Thanks for your time,
Timebandit

Edit: Gale and others were quicker then me lol ... thanks for the update.

There used to be guild full of power traders; Li, Hero, TSM, HoZ, UH, Spil, Dark & Gone which are still active etc.

Its kind of long to explain. If you had a certain item you could find a collector of it easily. You could basically trade off of your friends list and contacts. Even now I know exactly who to go to say if I wanted a quick sale on a r7 item. When you sit in Lions Arch all day you kind of get to know the other traders. Thus allowing friendships to develop. The big traders usually have guru accounts so you know each other on guru too. As well as traders you get to know the item collectors and what they collect. Sorry for the short reply but I want to watch jay and silent bob strike back so cant type much more.

Yeah, in other games people spend thousands of dollars. But I never thought it would happen in Guild Wars. I guess showing off your wealth in town makes them ultra desirable.

PM sent.