Auction House Pro Tip

[Martin240]

This seems to be a mix of a guide and usage of what seems to be a bug in the auction house buy and sell order logic.

Today I started trading and I noticed that the bigger your item buy and sell orders, the longer it takes the auction house to get rid of your stuff. So instead of buying and selling huge stacks, just start it slow with stacks of 50. My orders are usually filled within a second or two and I can resell anything right away. As the auction house system is really fast moving you need to pay close attention on what to buy and what's not worth the effort. I just made 20s to 1g20s within roughly one hour with this little trick. Here are two screens so you can see it for yourself and get some ideas on what to sell.

First screen: buying.
Second screen: selling.

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/4113/capture0j.png

http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/1963/capturehngd.png

Maybe I should also mention that there may be 30000 buy orders before yours, if you just do 50 the auction house will take yours. Don't ask me why, it's working that way. That should make the working of this a little bit more clear.

[nuclear12347]

Wow this has changed everything for me. I just made a lot of money using that method of jumping in front of the line. +rep for you.

This works like a charm even in stacks of 100 and 150.

[dvicious]

This could honestly be used to make a lot of money. Using copper I can buy ore(copper) at 16, and resell at 19 INSTANTLY. Not much profit, but the more you buy the more you make.

[Teresa460]

since release i sold alot of keys , all satisfied and live.

[DXENEME]

How do you make any profit?

Surely you lose all your profits in Auction House fees?

[xysoulxy]

does not really work for me... it sells instantly when I use the same price I bought it but if I go just a bit higher like 2 copper more it wont sell

edit: it works but it took 5 minutes ^^ I took the "in seconds" thing literally :P

[Reiu]

If you buy for 16 and sell for 20 you make 1 copper per copper after the 15% tax (5%deposit 10% sell ). Not really that profitable, but of course with the amount of copper that's being sold it can be decent - every 100 copper ore is 1 silver coin.

[Buffdawg]

I am a trader by profession (have not tried this in game but suspect it'll work similary) I suspect this is hugely exploitable at this stage in the game.

Using the 50/100 increments and 'budging' the line seems to allow you to front run against others selling larger increments. This makes sense because perhaps the system is working on a 'fill to kill' system so if you put in a 10000 sell order, it's not going to match it until it finds a lot of liquidity in the market. Whereas, if you are selling 50 (and maybe only 10 other guys are in front of you with 50 unit sell orders, then only 500 buy orders need to come in before yours gets filled).

To exploit this - you'll want to find items with the following attributes:

1) Bid-Ask spread of greater than 15% of the sell price of the item - the bigger the better - this is your profit margin
2) Large Buy and Sell orders - this is your liquidity - the larger numbers there are, the faster your orders get filled and the more volume you'll be able to pump through
3) Work down below the top 10 items lists - I suspect the profit margins will close out in the top ten list quite quickly as more people use this system... but will still be profitable (although whether time-efficient is another matter)

This is basically arbitraging and market-making in the item you are selling and you do sit on a small bit of risk in that an item will change in value for the minutes you are holding the inventory. But this is how banks do FX trading and why they have a bid-ask spread =)


Real interesting stuff... Might be able to run some technical analysis charts on some of these items and do some technical trading on this based on different server times. I'm sure there are alot of patterns you can discover and trade on too.

[Gbyrd]

Don`t think it`s an exploit, It is just how its working. TP is being used quite frequently if you look at all the stuff it is being sold rapidly.

[cloudchng]

anyone got short of item delivered? I bough 100 copper and only received 69 at the end. No more from "buying" and "bough" showed 100, yet in my inventory only got 69 copper.

[Macpod]

anyone got short of item delivered? I bough 100 copper and only received 69 at the end. No more from "buying" and "bough" showed 100, yet in my inventory only got 69 copper.

Common bug.
Source: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...first#post7508

[Buffdawg]

Hmm

been having a lot of success with this but then all of a sudden i put in an order for 120 items, I only get 20 'delivered' and then the money for the remaining 100 has gone MIA

[cloudchng]

looks like the trading post is not capable to handle such huge transaction yet.

[psolarxis]

is there a way to cancel your buying offer?

[Buffdawg]

psolar - goto "My Transactions" tab and then up top look for 'items i'm selling / buying' filter. You can remove both buy and sell orders.

I suggest you guys don't do this because their servers aren't able to handle it - you will lose gold because even if the underlying trades are profitable, you get screwed by missing items etc.