User:Tennessee Ernie Ford/Price checks/How much are GotTs worth

How much are GotTs worth?
A single Gift of the Traveler is worth about in goods that can be traded in Kamadan, which is pretty close to the lowest common price  that they trade at. This begs two interrelated questions:
 * What does it mean to say that a GotT has a specific value?
 * How much should I pay for GotT?


 * Specific value

There are two ways to objectively measure the value of GotTs:
 * 1) How much are people willing to pay?/How much do you have to pay so that someone will part with one? That's the same as asking what are the WTB/WTS prices, which are  and.
 * 2) How much value is inside each GotT? We can calculate this by taking the expected drop rate (using GWW data) of each item and multiplying it by the trade value of the contents.
 * 3) * For example, a Hunter's Ale is worth about 100. There's a 4.95% chance of getting 10 from a single GotT, so we multiply 4.95% by to find out that GotTs contain about  worth of that brand of Alcohol.
 * 4) * Do that for each possible drop and we get, roughly . See below.


 * How much should I pay?

Let's assume that your interest is solely in the contents of the package. (Those who deal in GotT arbitrage could care less about true value; they only care how fast they can buy for how cheap...and then how fast they can sell for how much.)

You have a choice:
 * 1) You can easily sell the GotTs for  and purchase the specific contents that you need. Or,
 * 2) You can painstakingly double-click hundreds of GotTs, use the items that you need, and then spend hours trading away the ones you don't for the best possible price.

Assuming your luck is close to the statistical mean, you are better off selling the GotT and buying what you need. You spend less time clicking, less time trading, and end up with about 400 extra per GotT. In fact, unless you happen to be extraordinarily lucky, you are almost certainly financially better off selling off the GotT on Mondays (when you can often get ); you need to hit the jackpot early, to make up for the lost opportunities (400/gift and all the time you spent instead of doing something else).


 * However... financially better off isn't the only measure.

On the other hand, there's something inherently fun about opening gifts and hoping for good stuff. Most government-sponsored lotteries offer approximately 50% of expected value for each ticket, e.g. on average, you should expect to lose a dollar for every two that you spend on lottery tickets. In that light, GotT prices are a bargain: for the chance to win big, you pay a premium of around 10% (instead of the 100% premium for Lotto).

Data
The tables represent data from these sources:
 * Guild Wars Wiki drop rate data &rarr; used to determine the chance of any particular drop. (Last compiled some time ago, but the ratios haven't notably changed. Originally based on 13,484 gifts opened.)
 * Trade data, from participating in sales, from the Estimator, and from Guild Wars Guru.
 * The most controversial numbers come from the Everlasting Tonics and Miniatures (volatile prices, since they are rare). However, those represent only 10% of the total value of each GotT, i.e. around 400.
 * I'm confident that the rest of the trade valuations are within 10% of the midpoint of any fair pricing.
 * When in doubt, I generally post a higher price here, so that the GotTs are more likely to be overvalued.