Pay close attention when selling items on the Guild Wars 2 Trading Post. You can get burned!

I had actually meant to write this post during the beta weekend but I decided to put up it now instead because I was more focused on doing the research when I had the opportunity. After all – there was a very finite amount of time that I was able to play Guild Wars 2 and now I've got a full month to inform you guys of everything that I've run across. I spent an extensive amount of time talking about the Guild Wars 2 trading post already but there is one important thing that I left out and I did it intentionally because it merits having its own post. What I am talking about is people trying to play you for a fool and essentially take money away from you. No it doesn't mean they're beating you up or anything like that. What they are doing is trying to capitalize on your urgency to sell an item when you're going to the auction house.

In the YouTube video I created which shows the benefits of paying attention to the top supplied and top demand items on the trading post I never went in to how things are actually sold. When you're selling items you've essentially got three different ways to sell.

1. First you can sell using Meet Highest Buyer. What this is, is players will go to the trading post and say "I am looking for this item and I would like to pay this amount." The buyers specify how much they want to pay and with a simple click of a button you can match that price and almost instantaneously sell your items that you're placing on the auction house. It's pretty sweet and it's the easiest way to make a quick sale.
2. The second way is to Match Lowest Seller. Now obviously what this does is you're going to match the price of whatever player is selling your item for the lowest price. This too is a quick way to sell your items because you're guaranteeing yourself that you are selling your items for the lowest price available at that point in time.
3. The third and final way is to Specify Your Own Price. This is a little bit more of a roll of the dice because you're banking on everything else lower than where you're at selling. During the beta weekend I did not use this last option a single time just because I was more concerned about coming across fast gold.

So what do I mean by you can get burned? Well – on the two different tabs it will actually tell you the price that items are being sold for or, in the case of matching the highest buyer, the price that they are willing to pay. On more than one occasion during the beta I saw people speaking in chat about how they clicked the sell button on the meet highest buyer and they realize that they had just sold entire stacks of items for next to nothing. When they did this they lost out on sometimes between 10 and 20 silver in profits! That is why it is important to look at those prices each and every time that you sell an item on the Guild Wars 2 Trading Post. If you get into a rhythm where you are just clicking sell, sell, sell and sell some more you can very easily get burned. This is because the incredible amount of activity that is always going on on the trading post. When you share a single trading post with everybody else across all servers there's going to be a beehive of activity almost around-the-clock. Those numbers, especially the match lowest seller, are going to be changing all the time.  Beware--you have been warned.

One of the scares that has come up with the trading post is that people could eventually run bots on it and prey upon people. They could potentially find items that move quickly like copper ore and post it for a price of one copper. Then when some unsuspecting player, who isn't paying attention, clicks match lowest seller and they have a large quantity of items they just dump them for what is essentially peanuts. Then a bot comes in and picks up these items and resells them for incredible amounts of profit. While we don't know the behind-the-scenes things with the trading post, we do know that this [likely] is possible.

The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post is very different from any other auction houses in other MMO's. Just the vast amount of people that are converging on a single entity in the game create that many more opportunities for people to come up with ways of scamming you. I know scamming sounds like a serious word to be throwing around, but in a sort of way that's what it is. Certain part of it also falls on your shoulders if you aren't paying attention as well so not all the blame is devoid of you. The good thing though is that now you know what you are looking for and there's no way any of you are going to fall for this – right?

That's my short little tip for today and I'll make sure that I remind you all of this as we are closer to launch because this is a potential issue that you could run into. I would hate to see anybody lose money just because they work quickly and missed one small little detail like checking the price when they click Meet Highest Buyer.

Thanks everybody, I will see you tomorrow!

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