Guild Wars 2 Trading Post Booty Bag Strategy with analysis.

Not all the markets and Guild Wars 2 are obvious. The ones that are obvious, at this point, have profit margins that leave zero opportunities. Crafting for profit has very few opportunities as well. In most cases when you buy the ingredients for an item and then craft that item you'll find that putting it up on the trading post is actually less profitable than just dumping it to a vendor. You've heard me say on numerous occasions that the Guild Wars 2 player base has adopted this vendor price +1 copper mentality. There is no doubt at this point that making gold is a little tougher than we thought it was going to be, but there are markets that still exist. Today is one that may not get you wealthy overnight, but it does leave you the opportunity to make gold.

Today's tip deals with the buying of bags from the trading post. (There is a fantastic podcast known as "ShoddyCast" which just covered this yesterday on their latest episode as well.  It is in the video to the left.) The strategy itself is very simple. All you have to do is buy bags off of the trading post, open them, and craft items from those items or sell them on the trading post for a profit. I have tried a few different bags from the trading post and I can tell you that the one I found to be most profitable is the Bag of Booty. Before I go any further in the strategy I really have to emphasize that getting it for the right price is crucial. Making gold using this strategy isn't as easy as just hopping on the trading post in buying it at whatever price it is currently listed at. On average I've seen the beta booty listed for around 50 copper – most days even a bit more than that. If you were to go and buy it at 50 copper you would more than likely lose money. Instead you need to place purchase orders for them at around 40 to 45 copper.

This strategy, just like all the others, rely heavily on what you get the crafting materials for. You always want to get them for the lowest possible price you can. This is an some great revelation–it's just common sense. This is much more significant in this situation because the profit margin is still pretty slim. The big-money relies almost entirely on the game of chance that you will get the most profitable items which can be found within the bag itself.

A simple search on the Guild Wars 2 wiki would tell you exactly what can be obtained by opening a bag of booty. The thing they don't tell you is the ratios at which items are dropped from them if you were to open them up. There are a ton of other variables that exist, but I tried to get a semi-accurate cross-section of what you can expect if you were to open up a certain amount of these bags.

To get a representation of what you can expect I opened up 100 bags of booty. These numbers would very just about every time, but I would say out of the four times that I did this the numbers that you see here are pretty close average of what you can expect. The way I did this I bought four sets of 100. I cleared my inventory out opened 100 bags and documented what I had obtained. Then I repeated this three more times.

Here's what I found.

x 100 - Bag of Booty

Sticks of Butter x 34
Cotton Scraps x 24
Claws x 6
Fangs x 10
Bones x 6
Vials Of Blood x 3
Scales x 5
Venom Sac x 13
Coarse Leather Sections x 16
Oranges x 21
Chocolate Bar x 17
Piles Of Radiant Dust x 6
Totems x 4

I can't really tell you whether or not it's going to be profitable for you every time because the prices of these bags are always changing as well as the prices of the items you receive from them. I can tell you that based on the prices at the time of the items I was receiving from the bags I could actually make money by only opening the bags and reselling all of the items within them. I bought 100 bags and made an investment of about 45 silver. After everything was sold I had brought in a little over 65 silver.

So as to not insult you by doing simple math I will just tell you that I was making on average about 10 silver per 100 bags I was opening. If you are hard up for gold this is a fantastic strategy to follow. It's incredibly easy and it only takes a small amount of gold to get into. Based on the prices at the time if you've got anything over one gold you can get into this strategy quite easily.

I hope this helps some of you people who are trying to make gold get a decent foothold to move forward on. Most strategies don't get much easier than this!




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