Guild Wars 2: 5 tips for making money on the trading post

Introduction

By most MMO standards Guild Wars 2 is a gold-intensive game. Do you need to get to the other side of Tyria? The teleport fee’s going to cost ya’. Need some lumber for that pretty bow you want to craft? You’ll need a special axe to cut down the trees for that lumber, a nice, shiny orichalcum axe, and it ain’t cheap, buster. Oh, you died? Too bad. Cough up some coin to pay for those armor repairs.

Nope, no doubt: Life in Tyria can get expensive. Sure you get a little coin from drops, quests and events, but if you’re not prudent with your coin, you can find yourself short of funds before you know it. GW2 kinda quietly chips away your gold until all you have left is a handful of copper.

But that’s not even the worse of it. What if you want something from the gem exchange, let’s say the pirate captain’s outfit? It looks like fun. It’s also 700 gems. If you don’t have the real life cash for that you can get it with gold from the game. Let’s see… Depending on the current rate of exchange, 80 silver is the typical price for a 100 gems. So you would need 5 gold 60 silver to get 700 gems. Yeah, that’s a lot of gold, isn’t it?

And have you looked at gear like the cultural armor and weapons? Yeah, it’s awfully sweet, but it’s also awfully expensive – Over 100 gold for a full set of tier 3 armor. Too expensive, you say? No one can afford that, of course. You’ll just get something off the trading post, right? Sure, let’s look there. Depending on what you’re willing to settle for a nice piece of exotic armor cost between 1 and 10 gold, and sometimes even more. That’s cheaper than cultural gear, but it’s still going to cost you some gold.

Yep, no doubt about it. If you want to get the sweet gear and the fun stuff, it’s nice to have some gold. Sure, there’s nice gear you can buy with karma and you can get gear by grinding dungeons, but it’s nice to have some gold, especially for the special stuff you can’t get any other way except to buy it.

So how do you go about getting gold?

You can farm for it, but that’s time consuming and you’re relying on drops: Sometimes you get lucky and get an awesome drop, but more often than not, you don’t. Plus, it just gets tedious. You can also run dungeons for gold, but they’re time consuming, too, and if you get in with a bad group or just have an off night, you might spend all your loot cash on armor repairs.

Neither farming nor grinding dungeons are dependable methods of making money. The best, most reliable method of making gold is playing the trading post. If you do it right, there’s little risk, plus it doesn’t take too much time and the rewards are very consistent.

Over the next few posts, you’ll learn how to make money on Guild Wars 2′s auction house, the Black Lion Trading Company.