High End bids now asks for embraces ? MUST NOT FLAME PLS + RESPECT

Funny on how since infamous dupe incident now some high end bidders are using armbraces like its a pile of dust ?

THIS IS NOT A SHOTING ARROW THREAD,,,YOU WILL NOT POST ANY NAMES OR BLAME ANYONE.

This is just a plain discution about why in your oppinion, those thousand ectos +50-80 Armbraces bids where not here before dupes.

Should we just pass on and continue or think about this a bit more ?

Why pre dupe bids where lower for those uber rare items and why post dupe now those are way higher but most important....including 50 + Armbraces as a new extra.

Your though and I beg...no flames, no nothing except constructive replys.

P.S. If you are curently bidings with Armbraces, pls, don't think this is a martial law court. Im sure your arbys where obtained normaly while playing the game and trading tons of titans for those rare babies.

Gore

What the hell is selling for these "thousand ecto+50-80 armbrace) bids?
Req 7 Crystalline swords? xD

Well actually you are wrong. There have been trades going on with Armbraces for a LONG time. Usually it is 6 slots of ecto, and 7th would be armbraces, since they have a considerably higher value. Example, the Panda minipet has sold for 100k+1500 ecto+50 armbraces. Which means that rather than trade 1750 ecto, or have to do multiple trades, the 50 armbraces are the equivalent of the extra ecto.

It has been like this for a long time, you just didn't know about it.

How crap! A Panda minipet is worth that much? Yeah well so much for me ever even coming within 1% of getting one

Well the longer the Panda was around (with no new ones being put into the game) the harder it was to get one, as the people who bought them usually bought to KEEP. So the prices have gone up lots. Kanaxai is even higher.

Even so, there have been armbrace trades for a long time, because be honest, what else is there that would fit if you wanted to trade over 1750 ecto?

I have follow the dupe treads closely during the time it was on and had many suspicions way before alot of us saw a animated cartoon caracter seling 80+ armbraces out of the blue in Kamadan. The reason he was seling those : prolly cuz he was legit so no flame here from me m8.

There is only one reason why im loged in as Gore here and not my real IGN.

Why ? Becuse way too many power trader know me both here and in game. I mostly dont even need to make ads here as I have my private list of seller / buyer and having a secret ID here help me alot findong out alot of things i am being told on the market : I know at least 2 other power trader who do this and understand me on that point.

That sayd. You dont start to play this game with stacks of ecots if you are legit and I have been on GW for only 23 months now....call me a late bloomer. This lead me to my main point.

So lets say this as a normal calculation Fenix :

1 - Time DOA was intruduce to NF
2 - Time it took for the first known Armbrace to have been on the market
3 - First time we had a Ectos + armbrace stack or huge amout offered here or anywhere else ?

If you make a normal rule here, even after having trading my second Panda and that...just 3 months before the duping.....NO ONE I REPEAT..NO ONE EVER OFFERD TO ME ARMBIES.

So all you have here is for you to help me on this. By you Fenix.....how long high end traders have been trading 50+ armbies + 1500/1700 ectos as a normal behaviour ?

I've seen Armbrace trades for months, well before duping. Most of them I saw in Ascalon, but there was even a few on guru, in the High End section. I believe I first saw Armbrace trades when they were around 100k+80 ecto each.

Fist of all, you are not the enemy and much respect to you as a first note.

This is only a remark on the current situation and i will pass to something else but you have to understand that only during end of January / beginign of Febuary all high end trader agree they saw the first ones around being traded......as 1 Armbrace.

Im asking stacks or adding as a more add in vallue of 1750 ectos.

If you ask me, I can say again.....even months before the dupe, as I sold my second Panda.......no Arbies where offered and even then.....nothing was more valauble on the market then 1750 ectos.

My 2 Cents, lots of duped Ectos and most of all Arbies are still around. Its just more quiet now.

Any though on why the ectos, after more then 3 months of weird trader prices going from 4.9 to 5.5 very stalbe where there ? Only this week all where amazed to see them at 6k at trader meaning some bough a couple there.

All these things are saying out loud......Duped items are still on the maket and lots are still there.

Again, this is not a hint on who have them...a general market observation.

Gore

of course, the armbrace trades started with duping, but most people did not know that armbraces stacked for that matter...now that people know they stack you can pay more than 1750e for an item..

Appears that way, if not then what is even more disturbing is that a person can play this game so much as to accumulate that amount of in-game wealth , I mean get a life.

Lol i sense jealousy

Jealousy not at all, but I think many will agree my point has merit. Without running off track it wouldn't surprise me if many dupped items still exist within the game.

I have my doubts, too. I have nothing factual to back up my belief but I have two names which I have my suspicions about. I've played since mid 2005 and these names only ever arose a month or two prior to the surfacing of the duplication exploit - probably when it began happening.

I'm losing faith in the purity of the economy.

Those 2 names are probably the same 2 that EVERYONE is suspicious about. If I recall correctly you quit a while back? They put in asian minipets. The 2 I'm thinking of picked up those super rare minipets for almost nothing, and sold them for huge prices. Instantly rich. Rinse and repeat a few times, and they become possibly the richest in the game...

Guild Wars criminal underworld?

"Guild Wars criminal underworld?"

You have no idea. There are those out there who believe that the item duping was deliberately allowed to continue as long as it did. They also believe that players were allowed to keep their duped items because it created a larger "wealth" gap between players.

Why? So that players would have to buy gold from Gold Selling Companies. Because of Arenanet's business model, having a healthy supply of Gold Selling Companies satisfies the hardcore PvE group that wants to pay real life money for ingame currency as well as gives them a large supply of accounts overseas. The Gold Selling Companies also contribute favorably into sales graphs.

When the wealth difference between players is so large, it encourages the poor-but-hardcore players to go to these Gold Selling Companies and pay real money for the virtual property.

Let's be careful as to what we think the truth about A-Net is, we don't want the thread closed and deleted mysteriously. Back on track, I was floored to see the ecto + armbrace bids myself, and not just 1500 + 1 or 5, but tens of them. It seems that perhaps a few of the bidders made some incredibly lucky past guesstimates as to how to invest their existing wealth. Perhaps just as incredibly lucky as those few who were sitting ready with an empty inventory and plenty of gold when the rare material crafters were rolled back.

Bought gold is rife in High End these days.

Keep your though coming but pls KEEP EM CLEAN.

This is no flame fest and I guess specialy againt the mother of them all ANet.

We all know that the Arbies trading started after the dupes where widely open but pls, keep the comments as constructive as possible.

Its no mystery that the higher a bid could go for a Rare asian mini was 1750 Ectos no more maybee 100k + but that was it.

As for myself , I have 2 screens that can make 2 players , still active, still buying tons per ban but I wont post then anywhere.

We need constructive criticisme and we need it plenty.

Peace

you get a few people who know eachother ingame and they decide that one of them will pretend to sell a desirable item on guru that they dont actually posses so the others can submit excessive bids to give the impression they have more money than they actually do.

I have no doubt that theres a lot of duped cash still around and even more "eBay" cash, but if your just refering to threads in the high end section then its most likely staged.

i believe the op is refering to the mini kanaxai in high-end atm. i saw that yesterday too, and the last time i checked the bid was at like 1500e + 70 armbraces.

that price doesnt really surprise me tbh. there are always a very small percentage of people that do nothing but play mmos 24/7. with that much free time, if youre sole objective is to accumulate wealth, it wouldnt be too hard. hell, even people with lifes outside of gw are able to accumulate large sums of in-game wealth.

I think adding hugs to a trade should be a welcomed practice! >.>

Could a mod please edit the thread title?

I would have initially said that this is wrong but i saw my firends case
Against my advice he started using bots and within weeks had enough gold and ectos One fine day his account was banned

I said to him he deserved it as he made gold from bots sold it to traders etc
But one week later he was online .He said that there were many accounts which initially do get banned but are reactivated within weeks

Thats sucks on part of Anet I have to spend 1 1/2 in dungeons to get one onyx gemstone if iam lucky that sells for 7 k and this guys make 200K by bots in the same time

if someone has actual proof that dupers are still out there with there truely duped items...like 7 stacks of armbraces...why haven't they sent them into ANET? Or is it that they have been submitted but no action was taken?

Honestly I can see how people could "honestly" get armbraces....i mean if you have stacks and stacks of ectos...you could easily get xx number of armbraces...they go for around 100+40 ectos now i think...so that is a total of 60 or so ectos for an armbraces...so one stack of ectos could get you 4 armbraces....so inorder to get 50 armbraces....you would need to liquidate 12.5 stacks of ectos...not sure but i would image people have that wealth in game...but then to have another 1500 ectos after that liquidation...maybe pushing the matter a little bit...not sure...but i guess with ebay gold etc it could be done without duping.

Eh, in one reccent thread in the Q&A, one guy (a legit power trader), said he makes about ~1 million every 10 days. Might have been joking though.

Still, there are some people who just have WAY too much money in this game. I'm not that upset though. A lot of people don't have money for armor in this game. Sigh. Its the difference between the top 1% like me (FoW, elite armor on all his characters, all the weapons/skills he wants) and the top .01% who have 1000s of armbraces and ectos crammed into their storage.

These days ?

I still can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that some people actually spend real money for in game items/gold/ect....

I mean if I was to try and sell off a screen shot of my war for $5.00 I doubt even the most die hard of players would buy it. This is just a game, you can't take the item out of your screen and touch it, nor can you take it with you when you leave this game for another....well maybe GW2 through the HoM.

As for the ambraces in the High-End trades, well nothing there is really worth having. Or you can get same skin for much much less with a diff req(9 > 7 imho) or even buy it in purple or blue or green.

And mini-pets?????? WHY? For the love of GW would you want to buy a mini-pet for more cash then outfitting 10chars with FoW and 2 sets of 15K armor would cost you???????????????????????????????????????????

Sigh

Before all this duping crap trades like this really did not happen.

People who obtained the armbraces for their mini pets did not get banned.

There are still alot of people will duped armbraces or who really deserve a ban.

The thread in question has been discussed many times today alone to me in-game.

I have said it twice today. If something similar to the duping incident occured today and there was a chance to profit from it which could result in my account getting banned I would 100% be willing to be involved. I could have had hundreds of armbraces but I decided not to. Now I see poeple with thousands of ecto who should have been banned yet have not.

It really does show how Anet are failing to ban people. Heck, I have never heard of a single person to be banned for buying gold. Yet I have been friends with people who have openly adimitted purchasing thousands of dollars worth of gold who have never received a ban.

There was a time when only a dozen or so people could have afforded to put up 1750 ecto and they have quit. Now you have dozens of random players around for a minute who have thousands and thousand of ecto.

Thanks god all this crap is affecting mini pets only.

Anet really need to make armbraces untradable and unstackable or something.

I am sure Anet will completely screw the mini pets market over.

I mean its not like a certain very very desirable mini pet on sale sold for 700 Euros and the owner wants to make a real life $$$ profit...

I am disgusted at how so many people avoided trading for duped armbraces. Yet those who did are not banned and have more ecto than anyone could dream of.

Edit: Anet are a joke. They cannot ban people to save their lives. There has been a certain player who has stolen like 30 million plus at least. Gaile denied he was ever reported even though he scammed like hundreds of people. Then there are all those people whose Ebay accounts I have which match their Guru names who have bought and sold gold / items. There are people still playing who have made like $5000 on Ebay. Are they banned? No. Have they been reported? Yes. It is soooo disgusting that Anet are so incompetant.

Edit 2: O the Kanaxi on high end which I wasnt refering to earlier Yeah bar one person I have never heard of any of the other players. To legitimately accumulate 3000 + ecto you could only power trade and I have bever heard of any of them and I have power traded since Junes 05...

And before anyone says I am jealous. I could have purchased like 3 Pandas with what I have made so I cannot be jealous. Just pissed off with the with Anet and their failure to ban people.

That was in 05/06. I havnt been able to do that since Factions.

It is a real real shame that Guru do not allow mentioning names as I could call so many people out on ban worthy offences. It is rediculously obvious just from asking a few simple questions how they managed to accumulate the thousands of ecto they have.

I mean to accumulate 3000 + ecto you legitely you could only power trade. And if you aint known to fellow power traders as some hard core trader then you aint made it legitely.

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This is the second thread which I will say it. There are way too many people trying to comment on this when they really dont have a clue what they are talking about. It is like me trying to comment on the pre-searing community when I have never really been in it. You really can tell who made it legitly and who did not and sadly many of the people in question did not (this information is widely available).

No.



Without a doubt. 100% sure they do. I mean people were wanting to buy like 300-500 ecto mini pets for 1200 ecto a long time after all the duping shit occurred.

I'm still pissed A-net did NOTHING to the people who got armbraces for a crazy low ammount. I was in a dungeon yesterday and someone asks me "Woah, noxy what kinda shield is that!" And I said it's the most expensive, and best shield in the game. Than, another party member goes "You call 25k expensive... you don't get out much. I have 9 armbrace, cost me 100k." This pisses me off... one, cause i spent A LOT of time in DoA getting the required stones.

And the worst thing about my DoA experience is this... Anet releases GWEN and says "You get a reward if you do GoA! Oh yeah, your going to have to redo it though cause we erase all of our .dat's after 7days. Sorry to those of you that spent many many many hours of getting to mallyx. Do it again, kthx."

Sir, as one of the few i have never encounter in game but know from your past post, ty for telling all that before the dupes, 1750 Ectos where the most a valuable could go for.

Its nice to see comments with constructivism and common sens.

WE, power trader know this as a fact....even a couple month before it came public...no one where offering large amount of armbraces for trades.

Keep your though comming.

Peace

This is a more complicated situation than you might think, though.

Suppose I went and liquidated the pair of mini beetles I've got tomorrow. I've got about 1000 ectos worth of easily convertible stuff (cash, dyes, and ectos themselves) laying around at the moment.

Suddenly, I'd be a huge player...yet you'd have no idea who in the heck I was, or where all the cash I'd be throwing around came from. I'm no power trader, but all of my wealth has come from legitimate sources (farming, halls wins, the odd bit of trading, and skill at rollerbeetle).

No question that some of the randoms are either dupers that didn't get caught or became wealthy as a result of the release of a great deal of stuff into the marketplace. Same with the gold buying problem. I'm certain that you overstate the case, though.

Just by virtue of Hard Mode and the game being out for a long time, it's become possible for people to accumulate amounts of wealth that would have been unheard of a year ago. There have been several instances of highly abusive farming since April that permitted players to earn multiple millions of gold per week without spending a huge number of hours playing the game. My guild leader is up something like 15 million gold from April...just by playing the game. (Needless to say, dude plays a lot.)

Ultimately, what every single one of these abusive farms leveraged was the fact that there are a LOT more people with large quantities of cash than there used to be, simply by virtue of the game being out for a long time and players tending to converge upon playing a single title character. Net result is that you can sell the rare farmed stuff both more rapidly and for more money than you could have done a year ago for items of similar rarity.

No new rare minis are being made; as a consequence, sellers can get whatever the most wealthy buyers can pay. So, as time passes, you're going to see bigger numbers as capacity naturally increases.



Now, with all of that said, the dupe obviously had some undesirable effects.

1) Capacity became drastically inflated. Lots more ectos/armbraces running around, and let's face it - a very limited subset of individuals profited.
2) Quite a few of the nouveau riche are pretty shady characters, which leads to the implication that they either were part and parcel of the duping, accomplices to it, or simply benefited from the feeding frenzy on armbraces after ANet started swinging the ban hammer.

Keep in mind who would trade for the duped armbraces. It only makes sense for those with comparatively little to lose to be the ones to gamble their accounts on scooping up armbraces, right? What follows is that the net effect of economic chaos + ban hammer = redistribution of wealth away from the existing wealthy to those who can afford to be less risk-averse.

That's a poor reward system; those who earned wealth legitimately get priced out of markets by those who gambled their accounts and won.

And that's why games like this need to be ever vigilant about problems of integrity and have systems in place to deal with problems WHEN they occur (as it isn't an IF, just a WHEN). If you fail to do so, you alienate a significant proportion of your player base.

I've been reading this thread, all the things sad here where always a topic of interest to me.
What does Anet these days about Gold sellin/buying.
Not much IMO i heard of people getting a 3 day holydays for buying Ebay golds
Iff this is right and my guts tells me so.
Anet is draggin there feet ATM.

And for the braces, i think anet should have give every player 1 or 2 brace so that every one could have a taste of it.
And i know that some people will not agree with this.
But they should have given those braces.
1/2 per account.
Hell yeah even i would be upset couse i workt hard for those gemsets.
but blame the dupers for screwin those torment weapons.

And fow what Mr. The Herbalizer said about posting names it would be cool to do that couse i had a list of 20/30 protential people who admited they bought Gold on the web and i had screenys of that they said it with date that it happent but i deleted it couse i had no hope in the fact that that information did any good ATM

And those people having like 3000+ ecto some may have gotten it fair but i have my doubt about some players couse they are spending TO MUCH that you only could dream.
Sure i know people who have a small fortune compared with other player hell yeah even i have a large ammount of platinum.
But i know for a fact that ebenezer scrooge spents much money compared to my friends and i
But i see people spending like there is no tommorrow with ammounts that i even think WTF how did you get that much.

I saw 2 mini panda's right next to each other a few days ago

Bought gold has always been around, but not to the scale it is these days. When some unknown comes in with a 1500e+xx armbrace bid, this raises alarm bells.

And the main cause of it is mini pets.

Anet seemed bent on making any expensive items worth barely anything.

But when it comes to mini pets releasing extremely limited ones is fine.

Anet really need to do something as it is beyond rediculous. 700 euros for a Kanaxi...

Yeah. That's what bothers me. A.net does all this to eliminate the valuable items in this game (inscriptions). Then they add in these limited sweep stakes mini pets that allow for massive money laundrying.

700 euro for an in-game item lol they person should get a medal for being one of life's biggest losers.

I'm sure some people became very rich after selling their rare minis. But the question is, where did that money come from? How is it that suddenly people have so much money to spend on minis... they couldn't have all got that much from selling minis, or the price of minis would never have rose so dramatically.

I find that since the duping incident, I get more offers of ectos for things I'm selling, even if they're not exactly expensive items. And these people pay top dollar for what I offer without hesitation, whereas people paying with gold usually try to barter with me.

It makes me feel uncomfortable selling to these people. Sure, it's perfectly possible that they acquired the ecto legitimately. But it's not the amount of ectos that bothers me, it's their behaviour. I always wonder if the ectos are a result of duping or ebaying.

There were lots of people with lots of ecto before, but I can't even recall offers of ecto instead of gold for items that weren't that expensive. And in the latest incident, I was selling minis, just not the really rare ones.

I still find it so hard to believe that people would actually spend real money for in game items... I have more than enough money for everything I want. But I too know someone I'm almost 100% sure ebayed money - it's a complicated story but I have a good reason to say this. And they were never banned. The whole situation is just sad.

Pretty much. I'm glad we finally agree on something. :]

Maybe, someday, you might jump onto my side of the fence and realize that the "in-game economy" is a sham.


Anyway, I fully support taking advantage of these duped ectos and the vomit of wealth from these people. Remember, the moneysinks are only increasing in number as they release more and more expansions and patches. Why farm when you can just sell a minipet for more money than you could have made in two years?
They probably didn't pay a dime of real-life currency. So many people willing to buy duplicated items. :\

In a way, I'm glad this only affects the minipet trade. I personally don't like minipets, so it's no sweat off my back if the first thought about someone with a panda is "That guy duped armbraces".

is it me of the Mini Kanaxai tread has disapear into oblivieon ?

What you guys think of this ?