Burn Rate: 0 to 1B in 30 Days (or less)

viva Hybrid Vigor!

Excellent job, Keep - I for one greatly appreciate you sharing this journey with us in your
original thread, and summarizing it in fine fashion here.

I also mirror peterpeter's thought that this should go in the guides section, and keep a
backup - this one is too good to lose.

Once again, Excellent work!

Regards,
4

Very nice work and a nice writeup. On one hand, I think this should be saved long term. On the other hand I'd like it to vanish into obscurity so that we don't get too many folks who flood the niches and result in them drying up. Otherwise my money printing machine might die!

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See, that was very insightful to me. I'm what I consider a small time player.

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Ditto here. As the official Penny Ante Operator of the Market Forum, I really wanted to see how people get beyond the 100 mil mark.

Very illuminating, and very much seconding that this should go in the guides as a case study if it needs a selling point to be there.

one thing i would like to suggest is to improve the storage capacity of the storage base one could create alts on that server as place holders thereby increasing your starting prestige, each toon u have join the sg boost that prestige.

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one thing i would like to suggest is to improve the storage capacity of the storage base one could create alts on that server as place holders thereby increasing your starting prestige, each toon u have join the sg boost that prestige.

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I probably should have mentioned in the writeup that I had a set of rules to follow, which I outlined in the original thread:

- No inf transfers
- No stealing from SG storage
- No multi-boxing

That last precluded me from using the "new member" prestige to improve the base, unless I wanted to invite strangers.

I'm PMing Ex to ask that this thread be moved to Guides.

Interesting. My 0-10 million trip (well, 0-5 million) would have been different and, I like to think, faster. I would have fallen way behind, though, on the 100M-1billion part. I believe.

I feel a little better about 200M of your total coming from merits... cause the one evening I spent thinking about this, I wasn't getting anywhere NEAR 1 billion in my head, unless I used merits.

I find the 137 hours to be interesting.

I think the next challenge should be in hours on-line with the character (allowing off-line market study with screenies, but not allowing extensive on-line market research with other characters - honor system obviously)

Can someone reach 1B in 50 hours on-line?

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Can someone reach 1B in 50 hours on-line?

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I think you'd really be pushing it to try this with a new character. If you were starting with a level 50, then maybe, but a new character has to level somewhat to earn transaction slots and inventory space - otherwise there's just not enough wiggle room.

Nether, what was the name of the thread? If you didn't save it somewhere, you or I could google cache it to get it all back.

This was an incredible read. I'm currently attending college as a business/marketing major. This sort of project is very interesting to me (though I never once in my life thought it would be). I would love to learn more about this, if it's possible.

I've a couple of lvl 50's on Victory, but certainly wouldn't mind rolling up a new toon to try this out. I'm a somewhat casual player, getting in about 3-4 hours a night, and maybe an hour in the mornings (if possible) on the East Coast.

Keep, if you have any advice, I'd be very much inclined to hear it.

The general concept is pretty much simple arithmatic. Find an item that fluctuates in price. Think if you were the low buyer AND the high seller. How much would you make?

So if an items last 5 says: 5, 10, 5, 15, 10.
If you bought at 5 and sold at 15 you'd make: 15 - 10% fee = 13.5 - 5 = 8.5 Profit.

Then compare going from buying a Recipe to selling a Crafted enhancement. Once you get the simply arithmetic and the little ins and outs of the interface then you get to actual business stuff.

Very good read, thanks for writing that and congrats on your achievement

Concise and very informative guide. Excellent job.
Thanks for sharing.

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Seeing the effort it took to accomplish, I will have to amend my original statement that anyone "sufficiently motivated" could earn enough for a max build in a month and make it anyone "TREMENDOUSLY motivated".

Given Keep's journey, which I think we can all agree is at the bleeding edge of market performance, I'm amending my original off the cuff estimate of one month and making it 2-3.
What Keep did in a sprint I think most of us could duplicate in twice the time, or a little more.

Kudos sir on an impressive and highly entertaining experiment!

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I still after all this time have yet to get over 230 mill on my one 50, or have a purple recipe drop or buy one. I guess the most important thing to have if you want to be rich in this game is time. That with me is spent in real life. I could see in about 5-10 years having most of what I would like to have in this game

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Nether, what was the name of the thread? If you didn't save it somewhere, you or I could google cache it to get it all back.

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From the Oct 3, 2007 archive, the title of the thread is Nethergoat's Astoria Adventure (unless there were an awful lot of other posts about DA).

There wasn't a cached page of that post, but it does show the post is #9181951. Maybe the Devs have a dusty tomb with a magical copy available?

Yeah unfortunately all I could dig up was all the names of the people that replied in that thread but no cached pages. There is plenty of trails that lead to the thread but I guess after a few forum purges, it got completely deleted.

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My first discovery was the Steadfast -KB, which sells at level 30 for 30M inf, about 400k/merit at 75 merits. However, I felt really bad taking advantage of this, because lower level ones sell for considerably less... and have less utility due to exemplaring rules. I only sold one before my conscience got the better of me.

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How can a lower level one be less useful than a higher level one? According to the description on the Wiki:

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This enhancement functions as a set bonus and is always on, even if in a toggle that is turned off or even if the power is greyed out because of exemplaring. However, the bonus of this Special IO is turned off if one exemplars more then three levels below the level of the Special IO itself.

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That means that lower is better. A level 10 SF -KB would give you the 4 points of protection exemped down as low as 7. A level 30 would only give you protection exemped down to 27.

That had to be a typo, because what he felt bad taking advantage of was the highest one available.

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My first discovery was the Steadfast -KB, which sells at level 30 for 30M inf, about 400k/merit at 75 merits. However, I felt really bad taking advantage of this, because lower level ones sell for considerably less... and have less utility due to exemplaring rules. I only sold one before my conscience got the better of me.

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How can a lower level one be less useful than a higher level one? According to the description on the Wiki:

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This enhancement functions as a set bonus and is always on, even if in a toggle that is turned off or even if the power is greyed out because of exemplaring. However, the bonus of this Special IO is turned off if one exemplars more then three levels below the level of the Special IO itself.

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That means that lower is better. A level 10 SF -KB would give you the 4 points of protection exemped down as low as 7. A level 30 would only give you protection exemped down to 27.

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I've noticed this sort of thing can happen if there is a large difference in supply for the Proc at different levels. A lower level, more useful Proc can sell for less than a higher level version because the lower level one is sold so infrequently that only patient bidders ever buy it.

If the higher level Proc has a greater supply, players have the option for "Buy it nao". Some procs (e.g. low level Freebird:+Stealth) only drop on the market every couple of months. Impatient bidders go away and make do with the higher level Proc.

The corollary is that if you are willing to sacrifice market slots for months at a time, you can make many tens of millions of profit on these items for very little investment. I have a toon on Freedom (not my home server) that flips low level Freebird:+Stealth, which I only check every month or so.

Awesome experiment/adventure!

So got any tips for us smart/lazy types who don't have to flip fast but don't have the motivation to search daily niches?

My usual approach is very simple:

What recipes do I currently have? Is the cost of salvage + inf to craft << the going cost of the IO?
Yes -> Craft and sell.
No -> vendor the recipe.

Along with dumping various rare salvage on the market at cut-rate prices and vendoring the excess common stuff every trip through Ouroborus.

Definitely not the best approach, but it was a simple painless way to get 137mil on my journey from 1 to 50.

I've since started a new character that is my "main" and transferred all the inf to her. So with 137mil to start, I'm trying to figure out how to get enough to start outfitting her with some decent IO sets.

I'm just about to conclude a similar experiment (lvl 49.5, day 35 passed the billion on day 32 having been away for 2 weekends which cost me a fortune), but with slightly different rules redside. It should be noted that my play hours are not US peak, this also makes it slower, the times I was on in US peak I made cash a lot faster.

I rolled an ElM/EA stalker on a server on which I had plenty of space but no other vills. The goal, level 50 and 1BN.

The rules:

Play solo only with no exploitative AE mishes
May use alts to sell stuff, but not generate inf themselves in other ways
(Non playing) friends could join my VG and invite my alts

I had few merits to play with and could have had about one Miracle unique or similar off arcs, but actually haven't spent my merits yet.

I used a number of level 3-10 alts to sell stuff created abd levelled in this period.

The first million was done much as you did, but the alts were started by the main buying 50 SOs and depositing them in the base, the alt picks 10 up and freespecs to get half a million.

The bulk of my cash was made by flipping uncommon salvage and then crafting common level 50 IOs and selling them through the alts.

I found redside that crafting my drops was not worthwhile, they didn't shift at any decent speed and blocked slots (apart from my one decent drop, a 70M pet set purple).

I picked up field crafter along the way, but if I did this experiment again, I wouldn't bother with all the lower badges, I'd just get the 25-30 badges for extra salvage capacity and whatever 45-50 badges for the IOs I actually wanted to make cash off.

Sure. With the big price swings I see on purples, the only question is getting the first 200 million and are you lucky/patient? If you timed the I16 or Going Rogue drop right too, that'd make it easy as cake.