I recently noticed that, instead of selling dropped weapons and armours to NPC vendors, I can sell them instantly for at least twice the money on the market, by fulfilling one of hundreds of buy orders.
I would understand if I could do that with rare/powerful gear – but there are buy orders even for level 10~, White/Basic-rarity gear with no sigils, upgrades or non-standard skin, and I could sell every single piece of equipment I would be able to sell to NPCs.
Why are so many other players buying any and all random gear, even if it has horrible stats?
(And, as a side question: how are they able to place orders on every permutation of prefix-level-type-skin without going insane?)
Best Answer
I've played this game on and off for over four years, and no longer have a single character that is below level 80. Once you get to that stage, you'll find that your drops are almost all level 80(ish) drops, which means that when you salvage them, you'll get only high-level (T5 & T6) materials.
So the best way of getting lower-tier crafting materials (which you need in large quantities for some high-level recipies) is to buy them outright or to salvage them from drops you buy. Once you realise how (relatively) expensive those materials are, you'll find that the gear is cheaper to buy, and if you're going to salvage it for materials anyway, "horrible stats" don't really matter.
(As for your side question: there are countless websites, such as spidy, that will show you all that information, plus of course you can use the trading post itself to search for gear in a certain range. If it exists in the game, those websites will know about it and it'll be listed on the TP.)