How to earn some gold on the side

So I REALLY want the lion cub mini and Rox's bow/quiver skins. Sadly, they may be disappearing tomorrow or by the 14th, and I dunno if I'll have the 50 G or so to snag them, or even the 18-20g to snag one. See my main gold income up till this point has been Zone Completion. I've never gotten a rare worth more than 40-60 silver from dragon runs, and even then I've only gotten 3 or 4 over at least the past dozen or 2 of runs. Dungeons can be profitable, but they always seem to take 2-4 hours for 1.5 gold, maybe 2 gold at best.

I recently PM'd Denji asking for assistance/advice, and his main suggestion was to check the Terminated thread. And while it is certainly sound advice...it's a bit harder to pull off since ectos are barely 22-24 s now, and in my near 10 months of on and off play I've gotten 1 BLSK. Period. 1.

I also, at this moment, only have about 84 silver in my pocket. That's the results of 2-3 hours of trying to flip on the TP and going from 64 to 84. At that rate, I should get 20 silver every 2.5 hours or 9.6 times, which is just under 2 gold a day. At that rate, it'd take 25 days to hit 50 g....yet I read Denji's post of 500 g an hour and plenty of other people on reddit and forum of their 10/20/50g a day profits. I'm not looking to suddenly become Denji level of gold making god. I'm not wanting to either...but there's gotta be some strategies I can use to make gold a bit easier than 2 g a day at best and spending 3 months just to get enough gold for 1 exotic armor set.

My other big issue is the fact that it seems like I need money to make money...there's no quick/easy/reliable way to make any sort of headway profit wise if you don't already have 5-10 G to start....doing it with half a gold or just under a gold is very slow and aggravating :(

Anyone have any advice? It'd really help. I'm not expecting miracles, and I dunno if there's much that can be done, but there must be something I can do to try and boost my gold earning rate without having to spend 4-8+ for 2-4 gold while others make 10x that in the same time frame :(

Will I be sad if I miss out on the quiver/bow/cub? Yes. That quiver especially is awesome, and no guarantee there'll be other quiver backpacks released...but it won't be the end of the world. If my price to pay to learn how to reliably make my own gold for the future is having to spend the last few hours/days NOW learning how while items are still around...so be it. At least I'll be able to earn my own gold in the future, eh?

I love Denji to death, all of the money that he made he gave to the family, but... he did find and use methods of "unintended design", that ArenaNet has fixed, for the most part. He's also endured a lot of bans. I would not recommend emulating his efforts. He does have a private, slower, but steady method for making gold, but he's requested that he be allowed to keep it private and not be bugged to share it. As for some of the others, I imagine they're talking about chain farming Citadel of Flame dungeon, Explorable Path 1. Some might play the Gems to Gold to Gems market (its like a mini stock market) and others play the Trading Post using the Mystic Forge. Other than the dungeon, those are all a gamble and may or may not pay off. Bottom line: You are not doing anything wrong. The economy in this game is tightly controlled, because ArenaNet sells gold for RMT via the Gem Store. Gold is supposed to be difficult to obtain via just playing the game, because they want you to spend real money in their store. If folks buy all of their Gems with gold they get from playing, then ArenaNet makes no money. Its a business, after all. I imagine that much like LOTRO, you will see these exclusive items come back on the Gem store at some point in time. ArenaNet makes a lot of sales on those types of items by making them exclusive and limited time purchases, so I wouldn't worry about missing them. They'll be back. ;)

I have the same problem, i need gold for a legendary. At the rate i earn money right now, it will take me over a year to get enough to buy all the materials and the precursor i need. This is really frustrating, especially when i often have just enough time to do my daily. I watched a lot of youtube videos explaining farming methods like cursed shore chain event. I tried that, i didn't even get close to the advertised 2 - 3 gold per hour, when i asked why the answer was ANET nerfed it to the ground. :( I tried farming Dungeons, but it is no fun doing this in a PUG, without some coordination we got wiped a lot. As far as i can remember i only finished two out of eleven exp runs and these two runs weren't really with a PUG, it was another guild and i was lucky enough to fill in for someone who had to leave suddenly. I haven't tried "The Game of Market" right now, first i have to do some research how this works. If someone knows a good tutorial please let me know :)

I have noticed that the prices on everything have fallen - even potatoes. It's a tough life to be a farmer now... I use to get 1 1/2 gold a day just from farming potatoes - that has dropped by 1/4... ectos use to fetch up to 40 silver each - dropped by about 1/2. The good news for me - just as Anet has tightened their belt on the economy - I have done the same and not spent any real life money on the gem store going on 3 months now. And although I would absolutely love the quiver for my Ranger, it isn't going to happen because I'm not spending the money. I use to make more gold and I spent more also - I make less now - I spend a whole lot less also.

as for the market game, well I use to play it quite a bit... but like most said before anet has a firm hold on it.... i'm certain they control items on there and make sure prices go down.. simply because everytime me and denji found a new way to make money, prices dropped the morning after.... I've been working hard on the market but there are to many mats and well crafting is made easy by this killing off the prices....

I made my small fortune farming cursed shores using the chained events. Small fortune is like 20G. I always spent to much to accumulate more. Having the right AoE build to max the returns is one key. Learning how the events spawn the mobs is the second key. Throwing the AoE at the mob as it spawns is the third key. If you can't be on top of it, your returns are minimal as many people know how to AoE at the right moment. Learn from them and you will see Cursed Shore is still not to shabby. I then do not sale my Materials...I break down my drops of ecto, and then I craft berserker gear as that has or had the highest return. I'll craft other gear as well but don't looke to sell it as fast or for as much. Any mystic forge I used was making more mats for the berserker gear. My return was about 1.5-2.5G per hour at cursed shores. I also find making 18 slot bags are not a bad way to go once you have the money. People don't have the money for the 20 slot and the 18 slot works good for alts. They usually sell in 24hours as long as you price it one penny less than the lowest priced. I make about 10silver per bag that way. Thats playing a long game, and requires a little money to have that. I never sell more than 5 at a time because I don't like to. But thats an extra 50silver a day. I don't know a quick way to make alot of gold and find farming...then crafting what I farmed to be the best way to get gold. Its not the funnest way to play GW2 for me and havent done said farming for over two months now. I also don't make much money in game now either. I could not find a true nich in the market, it was all small returns no matter what I did. I hope you set point prices to buy and sell...that makes a huge diffrence in the long run as if you don't you wipe alot of what you could be making with paying to much.

When it comes to flipping and market stuff, I do manually request and manually set sell prices. As for playing the market, I've tried using websites that list fluctuations and price histories and such (GW2TP) as well as possible profit prices, and it just took ages for only 20 silver. As far as crafting goes, if I had the crafting level and gold to start I'd gladly sell bags, however I only have 80 silver. I just think it's really stupid that travel costs 3-6 silver at max level, and the most we can expect to earn in a day is half a silver to barely a gold at best, and the higher the amount goes the more time one will likely have to spend sitting and playing the market instead of sitting and playing the game. "This stuff costs over 100 G. Whats that you only make 50 silver a day? Well, this'll still be here 8 months later...probably" Just aggravating, I get they want people to focus on RMT, and I get they want gems to be bought but...when ingame prices for a lot of things are 4 digit gold numbers or the entire sum of how much gold the 'average person' makes...that should not be the 'best case scenario'. "You make half a gold a day? Okay, 1 week for 100 gems or 2-3 ingredients a day." Like I said, Im not wanting or expecting to earn Denji levels cause that stuffs just insane lol...but there's gotta/should be a way to at least earn more a little than 0.5-1 gold a day at best....even/especially if you're low on gold as I am. Having to need 5+ gold to make a few gold profit a day is really infuriating as well because how are we supposed to get there if we don't have zone completions left and don't get good item drop rates? Spend a week trying to hope we get to 5+ gold farming zones? Can't do that easily, 20-30 minutes of killing will shrink your drop rate to nearly 0 to prevent the possibility of you being a 'farm bot'. Play the market? Well ya need gold to do that, so that's out. Farm dragons? What if you've never gotten good drops from them? Farm dungeons? Every time I asked in the 3 guild chats throughout March/Most of April, no one responded or no one seemed to be on. Balor was actually the one who came to my rescue and helped me to do CM Story, and it seemed to go much faster than any Dungeon (EXP or Story) that I'd done up to that point so bravo to him. Now it's entirely possible (And likely) that I'm just asking at the wrong times, but I've no idea when the best days/times are for asking for dungeons. I've been contemplating trying to get CoE runs going cause I really want the armor from there...but I've never done it before and I've gotta do 2 or 3 other story dungeons before CoE story and then I can farm CoE so...Gotta try n get groups for the prior stories first lol. I guess I'm mostly just agitated because I look at prior MMOs and I see ways to regularly earn cash if you want; farming zones, farming mats, farming dailies, doing raids always got decent $$ or drops in WoW. In GW2? Dailies give 5 silver. Farming mats was limited/nerfed because of heavy bot farming at launch. Farming zones? Only potentially profitable zones left are Southshore and Orr, and they can be aggravatingly hard at times to solo navigate. You can't redo hearts and very few node mats sell for more than half a silver to a silver, and if they do sell for that or more they're usually far apart in zones that can eat you solo. Dungeons? Well it COULD give you good loot...or it could give you 20 silver for 2-4 hours of work and spit ya out 'hope ya had fun' lol. Just seems like gold's way harder to come by in this than it probably should be, or the ways to reliably make it are not nearly clear enough if market prices imply the amount of gold high skill players can attain.

» Edited on: 2013-05-12 06:46:04

Farming skelk and karka is always a somewhat stable way of making gold...however boring.

I have trouble killing stuff in South shore, or I did. May try with this new build, but my old build it took like 1-2 minutes per karka and id always drop super low after.

» Edited on: 2013-05-12 11:17:35

The karka can be rough solo, projectile reflection is really helpful or grab a few extra people

*Sorry this post got kind of long, I wanted to make sure to explain my advice clearly* I'm not nearly as wealthy as someone like Denji, but I do manage to earn a decent amount of gold in the game. There's no way to instantly earn a ton of gold unless you're great at speculating or just get really lucky. But I can give a bit of advice which will hopefully steer you in the right direction to earning some steady income: - dungeons. You mention that you're considering running COE because you want the gear. Do it. First of all, running dungeons for gear or crafting your own is always a better choice than buying it off the TP. Second, it's a great source of additional income especially if you can complete it in a reasonable amount of time and without a large repair bill. I'd recommend trying to find some guildies to run the dungeon with you until you're comfortable enough to try a pug group when your friends aren't online to go with you. I know that every sunday there's a couple of dungeon events hosted by fellow guild members for anyone to attend. If you can't find guild members, watch videos on the dungeon on youtube. Look for dungeon guides on the forums. gw2lfg.com is a great tool for finding groups. Try a few different dungeons. COF P1 can be completed in 10 minutes or less for decent rewards. If you don't want the gear from a dungeon use the tokens at the dungeon vendors anyways and either salvage the equipment for ectos or throw it into the forge for some non-soulbound loot to sell on the TP - Farming. Medium to high level maps can be profitable farming areas. When you're running cursed shore try to stick to events. The shelter/penitent path alone can be slow, so watch map chat for events. Whenever you see someone mention a temple event/ plinx/ path to arah starting, go do that event. Don't hang out in one area waiting on one or two events to happen. When there's no event going run around and gather. Chop wood, harvest mithril. Don't stay in one map all day. Switch it up, go to frostgorge or another map once you've been in Cursed shore for a couple hours. Or go do one of the other things I've mentioned in this post. You'll get hit with diminishing returns if you stay in one map for too long, meaning less rewards for doing the same thing. -Crafting. Crafting items besides end-game equips can be fairly profitable. Look into crafting items for the level ranges at which players often purchase new equips for a character as they level it. For example, level 30-35 rare weapons and level 60-65 rare weapons will sell for up to 50 or more silver each. If you've got some crafting materials sitting in your collectibles vault you can easily turn them into some extra gold by crafting weapons in these ranges. Even the level 80 rares sell for 30-40 silver each. If you farm cursed shore you should have more than enough t5 crafting mats to craft a few of these and sell them. -World Bosses. If you participate in killing a world boss every 24 hours you're gauranteed at least a rare, possibly an exotic or several rares. World bosses include bosses such as jormag, tequatl, the golem in mt. Maelstrom, Fire Ele in metrica, etc. and all the Orr temple events. Either salvage the rares for some ectos to sell or sell the rares themselves. I prefer to salvage them with a Master Salvage Kit. There's plenty of websites with helpful timers to help you keep track of when these events will occur. - Play the game. This one might be obvious, but just playing the game adds up over time. Our guild hosts plenty of PVE events which will get you out into the world killing mobs, gathering, etc. As you accumulate loot in your bags, always make sure to vendor the greens and blues. They're usually worth more when vendored as opposed to salvaged or destroyed. Deposit the crafting and gathering mats you find, and put them to use later. Always keep gathering tools equipped and use them whenever you get the chance. -The trading post. Once you have some gold built up it's a good idea to do some flipping or investing in the TP if you know what you're doing. I'm not going to try to explain it here, but one website I've found offers some easy to understand guides for getting started: http://blacklionsprofit.com/guild-wars-2-gold-guide/ Once again, sorry for the long post. I hope you can find something useful here even if you aren't able to grab that mini pet before it's gone.