taking suggestions for a proposed 'free inf' guide

I want to compile & document via screenshots a collection of idiot-proof inf earning methods for the absolute market know-nothing.

On board so far are selling your big insps from the tutorial, buying cheap giant insps on the market and combining them into big selling insps (like 3 resists > 1 defense), vendoring high level recipes & underprices salvage, flipping generic IOs, and crafting set IO drops.

What other things have y'all done for inf that literally anyone in the game could do if they were willing to lift a finger on their own behalf?

I have done this:
Churned out some quick tickets and rolled common midlevel arcane salvage for sale.

I have not done this but it is guaranteed inf:
Use those tickets to buy a currently high priced uncommon or a rare selling for 1 million and sell it. (It really cannot get any easier than that I don't think.)

To get the ball rolling on my new characters I just search for level 50 rare recipes that have many for sale and 0 bids. They vendor for 10,000, and you can easily pick up quite a few for 1 inf each. In this way the newbie might start learning what items are in demand.

I would suggest that some aspects of this guide may need to be held off depending on the impact of issue 16, as some of these new features may radically redefine droprates, and potentially the market.

Currently, flipping uncommon salvage is an excellent method for making inf starting out. This may change, but a player with under 30 million inf available can quickly double and later redouble that by simply flipping uncommon salvage. I do this with all my lowbies.

Learning to bid competitively is essential to flipping. There are cases where aggressive bidding to obtain temporary control of an item is possible, and this method can reap rewards quickly, but this usually dries up. However, there is typically a better way to bid by appearing innocuous.

Once a particular item has been identified and a determination has been made that a flipper is active, you are faced with a few choices:

1) The invader. This guarantees that you will get the item over your competitor, but also informs your competitor that there is another aggressive flipper. If your competition is active, you may quickly be engaged in a slowly escalating contest over who can outbid the other. If you have the time and patience, you may be able to win out.
2) The innocuous bid. This bid is intended to appear as if you aren't a flipper. So you won't be bidding a number like 65,413 for say unquenchable flame, but will bid 100,000, a nice round number. This number does not necessarily look too threatening to the flipper, yet guarantees your purchase of the item. If overdone, the flipper will see through your trick, but you may be able to easily skim off some profit when you resell that 100k item for 200k+.
3) The clone. If you want to enter into a market without alerting the flipper, you can choose to match the flipper's price. Likely, the flipper will never discover you have joined in on this, especially if this is a faster moving item. You will share the spoils with the current flipper, but you likely will not have to worry about altering your bid until you are discovered or a more aggressive flipper arrives.

There is an art to flipping, and brute force may work, but it negates the long-term viability of an item. I will refrain from naming the IO to avoid blowing my niche, which may still have some profit left to give.

Recently, the going rate of a level 50 IO recipe was slightly under 20 million. I saw that the crafted rate was consistently around 40 million, and that impatient buyers would even pay upwards of 50 million for the recipe alone. So, I decided to move in on this recipe.

I started out by investing about 800 million inf into this market, placing 40 bids of 20 million each across four characters. This number was a round number, typical of a common player. It did not appear that I was intentionally attempting to purchase large amounts of these IOs to craft or resell at a significant markup.

I was able to sustain this ruse for about one week before aggressive flippers moved in and began to drive up the price above 20 million. Currently, the aggressive flipper price is slightly over 25 million, negating my next innocuous bid choice, and I have chosen to abandon this IO until the price calms down.

In every one of these processes, the player is seeking to buy and sell over a longer period of time rather than a single playing session. Often bids are bought and sold overnight, allowing for a regular cycle of buying and selling. In all cases, the buyer must consider:

1) Profit margins
2) Frequency of sales (will your item move quickly enough to be worth it?)
3) Potential Competition

edit:

Buy level 25 and 30 Accuracy, Damage, Recharge, Endurance Modification, and Endurance reduction recipes from a crafting table. Put them on the market for twice what you paid. Come back tomorrow with more than double your inf.

RagManX

Ragman: A year ago that was "put up a bid for ten level 30 Recharge Reduction recipes for 1300 inf each, come back the next day, sell at vendor for 4000" (or whatever the level and price and sale price were.) Stuff that works RIGHT NOW won't necessarily work in the future.

Flipping generic IO's (I'd pick L35-40 end reduction, rech reduction, and healing as six to check out) is somethign that has worked since like day 3 of issue 9. My only problem in the "know nothing guide" is ... how, with no knowledge, do you know what price to pick as a buy and as a sell? This is my own ignorance: I have flipped about six generic IO's in my life and those were obvious slams (selling for 11000, normally sell for 300,000) and I knew the market very well.

Don't forget to include in your vendoring list SOs. I've seen people dump them on the market (especially the 50+ level ones) for a fraction of their vendor value. If you are going to load up you just as well load all the way up before going to a vendor.

My wife doesn't like to transfer funds to a new alt. She does recipes, salvage, and enhancements all at once to fund lowbie alts. She's usually sitting on 1-2 mil by level 5 when she heads to Kings Row just from vendoring.

Also don't forget to list those off the 5's level TOs. You can occasionally snipe an influence transfer and even if that isn't your intent someone clearing out that category so they can make an influence transfer may pay 50-60k to clear out your enhancement just so that they can make a transfer.

My method requires no knowledge of the market other than how to follow the 'last 5' on a transaction. I employ this method on a lvl 50 character, but I think it would work about as well on anything that is lvl 30+. I have a PB that has almost hit 30 and could try it on that toon as soon as I ding to see how lucrative it is. For the time being, assume the toon is 50.

I like to run solo Lt farms. Of course, with the changes in I16, it will take some tweaking, but let's just assume that you're running AE missions and earning close to the ticket cap on each mission, if you aren't exceeding it. I use my tickets to by 35-39 silver recipe rolls. This gives you enough recipes that normally sell for at least 1 Million, that it is worth the salvage investment. Don't worry about trashing anything unless you really want to and just buy the salvage you need. Then simply craft and sell. Along with normal game play, this method has always left me with more influence over the long haul.

this is how out of it I am after enduring a day of 106 degree heat in a workplace without AC:

I looked at the title of this thread and thought "hey, that's a cool idea!"

=(

Bid 500k on rare salvage RITE NOAing for a mil, come back after work, its usually gone through. Sell for a mil and make a quick buck.

((I personally buy up about 25 mils worth of this salvage, go out of town, come back to it all filled relist and end up making 10-20ish mil.))

I use the Avenue Q method: "In volatile market, only stable investment is PORN!!!"

Ashes to ashes,
Pheonyx

While I'm sure prostituting your catgirl under the globe in Atlas is extremely profitable, I'm focusing this guide on the market.

=P

I agree wrt to recipe vendoring.

I still works every bit as well now as it did when I wrote my guide on it nearly
a year ago.

If I-16 predictions are correct, recipe supply will go up (the potential drop bug
thread's concerns elsewhere notwithstanding), increasing the availability of
cheap (and undervalued) recipes. I expect that strategy to continue being
effective.

The only other "moron-proof" starter strategy that NetherGoat didn't mention
initially (that Milady's Knight ? covered) was L50 SO vendoring. While much
more limited than recipes, it also works quite well for boosting character
wealth in hour one of their careers. Buy 'em for 100, vend them for 10,000. Cake.

I think most of the slam-dunk basic strategies have been covered now...

Let's see the pictorial guide, Goat!!!


Regards,
4

I'll start collecting screens tonight, provided my dum DSL is back up.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

I'm not so sure this idea will work oh Capraific One.
As soon as you deliver stacks of your 'free inf' guide to Atlas they will be carted away and sold to your target audience for 10M inf each.
(With a complimentary copy of 'Teenage Catgirls in Heat', they'll go like hotcakes.)

Seriously though, most fast & easy ideas are spread out in various guides,
so PLEASE assume your audience has A.D.D. and just chugged two liters of cola.
(oooh did he say PICTURES? everyone likes PICTURES! You just might pull it off.)
Looking forward to sending the link to my TL;DR friends.


Morty's objective input:
(tl;dr version: Tie basic marketing principles to Instant Gratification)

Fast & easy RESULTS are what got me thinking for myself, moving on to higher price/risk items, with a Valuable Lesson. Get me?

That stack of ten inspirations? Worth more on the market, or selling to a vendor?
How HIGH can I sell? How LOW can I buy?
This was a REVELATION for me way back when.
There was no risk, but I came away with a first tier 'Market Awareness' inspiration.

That taste of Instant Gratification got me interested in reading this forum (and the guides) and LEARNING, instead of raging that I can't purple out my Warshade.

Just my 2 bales of hay.
-Morty

As soon as this guide is posted, I'm going to set it up on my own subscription website and spam people to join for only $9.95...

Seriously though, this sounds like a great idea and I appreciate you're taking the time to do it.

Place bids at half of average last 5 on Monday, collect on Thursday and list for 1.5x your purchase price. Collect funds on Monday and repeat.

Whenever you want to buy something for your character, buy 2 (or more), sell the extras for at least 20% more than you paid.

DSL problem turned out to be my router dying, which I didn't discover until near bed time.
Anybody got a favorite wireless router?

Screens tonight- I'll be posting rough drafts here for constructive feedback before finalizing things.

Breast slider....

Flea suggested "Whenever you want to buy something for your character, buy 2 (or more), sell the extras for at least 20% more than you paid. "

Possibly a better approach is to compare price of crafting yourself and buying crafted; if favorable, buy two of everything, slot one and sell one. This might be too subtle for "foolproof market hints".