See it does work.

OK. I sell drops and roll merits and tickets and such. Now over a billion on my main 'bank' character. But I wanted to try a little experiment. I did not want to get into hardcore high-end flipping strategies, but wanted to try a few things from the forums here.

I took a lvl 27 on my second account that I knew I would not be playing. This allowed my 13 recipe slots and 15 auction transaction slots. THis helped. I started her with exactly 500,000 inf.

I did this last night after work. Spent awhile since I was new finding things.
Basically all I did was put low buy respectable bids on Common IO recipes (mostly lvl 50 and mostly less useful ones (snare and range and such). I also used lvl 50 set IO's that resell for $10,000 and can be bought for $1,000 or less.

I but in a full tray of bids, but because I was looking and exploring for the first time it took awhile and I had alot bids filled. So I ran a bunch and put more orders in. I ran my main for a bit and then before bed, I logged back in and ran my filled bids to the vendor and reloaded.

I logged in this morning at 9 am and did the same things. After cashing out and making bids I left the girl logged in and made myself something to eat. Came back and did it again. I just now logged into the character at work (dont tell the boss) and cleared out.

So in 24 hours approx and a few logons, I went from 500,000 to 3.8 million. Not bad for a days work.

Now I know I could make that in an hour or two farming with my lvl 50 fire/kin, but this was not intended to make me a billionaire, it was to show that a mid-lvl character who CANT yet make 1-5 million an hour can still make money on the markets if they so choose.

I did not even TOUCH buying and vendoring salvage.

Obviously the more people doing this make it less profitable, but it CAN BE DONE, if someone wants too.

Noone ever said it "can't" be done. (i don't think)

I kinda did the same thing. I logged both my accounts, ran 2 farms. Filled my recipe slots. Some IO's and some commons, not to mention the salvage. (2 orange on each account) Went to the store in Atlas and sold commons. Made 2 mil roughly on those. Then flew to WW and sold IO set recipes for 222 (didn't even check going rate) and made roughly 7 mil on those. Then posted salvages for the same 222, and made another 4 mil on those.

So, i guess in the same amount of time between your flipping and my farming, the farming count out a little ahead. But like you said, not bad for a days work. Although i had a better day last friday, i got 3 purps in 2 runs and made approx 450mil. Again, not bad for a days work.

There are many and varied ways to make lots of inf in the game, the only thing required is a bit of initiative.

Anybody who looks at the market as an opportunity instead of an enemy can make as much inf as they want.

Oh yea, I know there are tons of great strategies out there. I do not take the time to do them, I usually get my influence from playing. I posted more for the lurkers and peeps checking the market forum. You know, the people always complaining about never having more than 20 million EVER. This is fairly easy stuff, at least the stuff I was using.

Your intentions are good, but I don't really think it'll change anything. I think most people are well aware that there are many ways to make money. A lot of complaints regarding the market stem from the fact that 1) the complainers dislike the options for making money presented or 2) think it's grossly unfair that people can make money by playing the market.

Yea your probably right. And since I have 50's and can make great influence that way, I am probably still going to run this out for a bit. We are short computers at work, so I have been bringing my own laptop to work on. While I would never do any fighting or missions or such at work, I CAN sneak on and check the markets. So its one way I can make influence even while working.

I have nearly 1.4 billion influence on Infinity, and my only character above 10th level there is all of 22. I almost never play there, but I started marketing to see how far I could get. I think I started early last Spring by buying and vendoring recipes until I could manage to memorize a level 35 heal IO recipe, then I crafted and sold those for months until I decided to get into more profitable set IO crafting and selling.

Granted, it's taken me the better part of a year to get to 1.4 billion, but I don't check that character on a daily basis. If it were my only character and I were logging in twice a day for a few minutes of marketing, I'm sure I could have gotten here in a few months at most.

But the important thing is, I had a few million inside a week. That's enough to buy level 25 generic IOs and you're pretty much set for the life of your character, unless you get to 50 and want to get serious about it.

I do this on my alts on a very regular basis, market enough for a couple of million and buy generic IOs, sometimes by level 17 (level 20 IOs) and then maybe upgrade to level 30 or 35 later on.

True. The point is that there are a finite amount of things being placed and sold on Wentworths. Because of the nature of instanced missions, there is no limit to the amount of behemoths, freaks, etc. that can be 'arrested'.

I think the complaint that anti-marketeers have is that people who just play the market contribute nothing and simply leech off other players' hard work. It is the same argument that Marx made about speculators.

In the real world markets serve an extremely important purpose, spreading risk and providing capital for the people who provide services. One could argue that the market in the game serves a similar function.

Producers of in-game items (recipes and salvage) have a finite resource (market slots) that they must shepherd carefully. The devs intentionally limited the number of recipes and salvage items that characters can effectively hold to prevent hoarding and make the market possible.

A producer who gets 10 or 20 recipes in a day can often not sell those recipes for what they are worth. In order to get the use of the market slot back an item must often be posted for less than its actual worth, to make the slot free up more quickly. This is the "service" that marketeers who flip recipes serve. They hold items in their market slots that other players have no room for.

Now, there's really no need for marketeers. Every player could simply post their recipes for a reasonable price instead of underpricing it. But that would mean that people would have to stop playing their characters when their recipe inventory fills, or they would have or vendor recipes, or just delete them.

This is also why patience is key for playing the market. If you wait long enough and place enough bids, you can usually get everything you want at the price you want.

I honestly don't understand people who refuse to use the CoX market. It is really one of the most benign markets there is. If you treat it like a store where you put things up for the price you want to sell them for, and bid for things at the price you want to pay for them, it's basically like going to the grocery store for a head of lettuce. Compared to games that have auctions, this is pretty straightforward. Making bids is free, and posting items is cheap and not time-limited.

I find that posting my drops for reasonable prices I often reap huge rewards. But I always get at least what I asked for, so I'm happy. What's not to like?