Power Traders: Scum of Society?

When I came back, a year and a half had past. my stack of ectos meant nothing anymore. Now there were titles to be bought, super rare minis, ecto gloves, everlasting tonics, award winning skins to be had. I was on a quest to get rich again.

Not being a pve expert, I decided not to get too much into pve farming. So I looked into power trading since everyone here said it was the best way to get rich. So after a while I've been looking around Spamadan and Lion's Arch seeing the same couple of people hawk their wares all day every single day.

One of these so called power trader tells me that he is trying to sell his obsidian edge that he bought from a "noob" for 20k, and now he is selling it at 100k70e. He says once he sells this, he is going to look for another noob to buy from. This seems to be the common story among the power traders I've talked to. Does this seem horrible to anyone?

I've tried this buying low, selling high thing for about a month, and it was quite fruitless. I never had the luck to find a "noob" that would sell a high priced item for cheap like the countless power sellers I've met.

It seemed that anyone selling or buying non-merchant crap was a power trader himself and/or looked through guildwarsguru and demanded similar prices, even though no one made bids because the prices were too high.

I was making maybe 5 ecto profit each day for spamming about 6 hours. If this was the way to get rich, then I would've been fine with that. But there are countless stories of people with thousands of ecto, and I've seen people on here bidding with thousands of armbraces after the big ban. I just know that this wasn't how they got rich.

Yet I see these same people selling the same item all day for a small profit, and I even see them in the High End section of the forum buying high end items, and then trying to sell them in spamadan for 40 more ecto. The next day I see them drop the price down to 5 ecto because everyone else knows about guildwarsguru or their prices are way too high.


After thinking about all of this, I've decided to stop powertrading. It doesn't seem to work as well as people here say it does, and it just seems wrong ripping off noobs.


My question to you is, do you think power traders are the scum of society? They drive up prices for all the high end items just so they can make a profit.

And also, how do people get so rich that they still have thousands of armbraces?

1. Yes buying from unaware people is good way to make money (although fairly immoral but then again who is on the internet)
2. It's luck, you arent going to find a newb selling a panda for 3k.
3. They are dupers that escaped the ban or know a duper. SImple as that. Some people deny it but there is no other real way that someone has 1000s of armbraces.

Ah this topic again. After reading your post, I've already gathered you've made your mind up.

No. Power traders are not scrum, it's a legit way of playing in a MMO. Everyone has the same access to information as said power traders, if people choose not to inform themselves before selling, they are to blame.

Knowledge is the key to wealth, the quicker people realize this the better. Any idiot can knock out a 55, but it takes true knowledge of people and the game before you can into my league.

Power traders. Dont care much about them and it aint a fun way for me to make gold.

As for being rich i have an almost full GH with more then 100k in storage so when i need a weapon mod or some rune/insignia i dont have to farm 2k to get it.

How i make money? I do a lot of missions/quest/vanquishing with friends and allies and i farm the snowman for crappy stuff and monk tomes.

When i get bored of the game enough to power trade, i'll play SIM Stock Market instead.

Just my humble opinion.

scum of the earth? it's just a game! do i think they're scum? no, and certainly not "scum of the earth." and the reason is because they're just selling vanity items that do work the same as collector items. the great thing about guildwars is that money is not all around that important. sure, you need some for skills and armor, but that's about it. everything else is just vanity.

what i find interesting is that you said you make 5 ecto every 6 hours. at current exchange rates, that's only about 25-30k. you might as well hfff in lutgardis conservatory since you'd be making slightly more gold doing that.

Well what if you wanted to buy an obsidian edge right now? I can tell you with a great bit of confidence that the majority of the ones being sold in kamadan are from power traders that have probably bought them from the Guildwars Guru auction.

Doesn't it bother you that they've basically bought out all the stock and are artificially driving prices up?

The world of an RPG is much like the real world, people need to make profits in sales in order for a business to stay alive.

except for the fact that you don't pay taxes on those sales, you can't pay your mortage with gw gold, your characters don't need to eat, etc.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.

not really because those swords don't work any differently from other swords.

well I power traded in other games before and to sum it up i have to say this

was it fun: no
Did i feel good about doing it: no
did it make me money: yes

luckily in GW i seems to make money just fine by vanquishing and exploring and just playing the game that i love and don't feel the need to power trade as i did in those other games

1. I'm pretty sure Malice wouldn't have a problem with that
2. there isn't a set number of any item in the game, and I doubt all the power traders secretly meet to fix prices

Well somones on the high horse. True though tbh

Power trading really sucks now, the Z-chest ect gives out 593732754.86 of the "rare" items per second and the stuff that was acctually rare (non-insc) is uncared for because the people are either soo rich that the can have anything (like malice) or dont care (me).

But overall incription weapons killed off power trading so you can be happy with the fact you won

Exactly, power traders can not control the ENTIRE market and new items are being introduced the entire time.

Well of course they don't secretly fix prices. What they do is they just set their prices based on all the ones being sold in the forum. And they keep raising the prices as much as they can so they can make a profit when they bought it here a week ago.

Even though there are new items being introduced every day, the number of obsidian edges are quite limited, and I'd say 1 or 2 new ones end up on sale each day.

So all the hungry power traders snap it up and raise the price, before the normal player logs on (because he doesn't spend all day looking for trades). Now do you see how power traders are ruining the market?

Why do people assume that you have to take advantage of an ignorant person to do this?

Selling stuff cheap = less time standing around, more time to go out and make money doing other stuff. If I see somethin being sold super cheap and no one's taken it yet, I might just buy it to resell. It could be a simple case of a person that hates selling and decides to put low prices on their stuff.

When you're actually telling a person that a "rare" item is actually not rare as an attempt to make them sell it cheaper, that's a whole different thing....

No, it doesn't ruin the market. If a power trader snatches up a rare weapon before its general knowledge, and sells it for a big profit, good for him.
I worked at Target over the Christmas break for college money and heard a lot of customers complain about not finding Wii's. We made the dates we would have them in fairly known, and specifically told customers to be there when we opened if they wanted to get one. Despite this people still complained about not getting Wii's and their only option being to buy one from someone else for a much larger price. Whose fault is this? Theirs; if they would have had the initiative to get to Target when we said we would have Wii's, like the price gougers did, their kids would have had one under their tree.
If you choose not to be aware, its your own fault.

Because they all know about guildwarsguru. Every time people try to buy below the standard guildwarsguru price and everytime they sell, they always try to sell way above. So the only way you would make money is if you can reverse this trend, which would only work on people who don't try to make a better trade than the ones going on here.



You must be the first person I've heard who advocates price fixing. I don't think anyone else here would enjoy having to wake up at 1 in the morning and wait in line for a day outside to get a wii.

I think someone is just bitterly calling power sellers "scum" after numerous failed attempts at this "scummy" behavior. I'm not going to judge you (or anyone else) for doing what you can to get rich quick, but I found this funny.