'casual player' earning power

These findings are bogus...way too many assumptions. I find the idea of someone who regularly posts in the Market section of the forums "pretending" to level a toon like they think a casual player would kind of funny...maybe with hopes of justifying their own beliefs?

Food for thought if you like.

The person who introduced me to this game is my RL buddy, and probably subscribes for two months total every year, and I'd definitely categorize him as very casual. Some things to keep in mind for your analysis...

He runs on DOs, because SOs are too expensive to keep reslotting.

He doesn't sell drops. He didn't even know or notice that his recipes and salvage were full until I pointed out the red letters on his power tray to him. The entire Invention system is beyond his scope of interest. I suggested some reading on the forum to help offset the chronic shortage of inf, but he laughed at me because reading forums and faqs shouldn't be a necessary part of having fun *shrug*

He's currently level 32 on a brute he created last holiday, so his entire income is earned from defeating mobs and mission/arc bonuses. He had around 800k I believe after I crafted some generic 30 IO's to save him reslotting funds mentioned above. This is after turning off SG mode as it was cutting into his earnings. I gave him 5 mil or so which should last him well to 50, whenever he does that.

An odd case perhaps, but there is a part of the playerbase like this.

I duspute that entry into IO sets are that problematic even for a new player.

Uncommons are mostly cheap easily available, and most of the time get good basic coverage of a powers needs, maybe with a slot spare to put anything missing.

(Exception the real lowbie sets with have just 3-4 pieces, but again put all of a set then cover the weakness with commons).


Optimising builds maybe problematic for a newcomer, but slotting 'Volley Fire' plus an extra damage or two really is not.


Heck, the first character I dipepd into sets with, I basically slotted IOs for the set names (Emp/elec with Thunderstikes and Doctored wounds). It is a valid approach for a cheap performance boost over 'regular' enhancements at any level.

That's pretty interesting. How much game time per week is classified as casual in this research though?

As a point of comparison, I recently took a BS/Nin Stalker from 1-50 doing mostly solo missions set to +3/x1. I slotted sets as I levelled and could afford them, and by 50 I had earned enough to pay for my planned softcap build, which cost 500-600 million all told, with about 40 million left over. The only big drop that I got from defeating enemies was a Respec recipe in the mid-30s, which sold for 100 mill.

I definitely got a few good drops that sold for 10-20 mill, but the biggest source of income by far was reward merits. I earned over 400 merits from 1 to 50 - about 90 from Strike Forces and the rest from story arcs. The recipes that I bought with these netted me 350 million inf on the market, which was a little more than half of my total income.

This was the first character that I'd levelled all the way from 1 to 50 since merits were introduced, and it was also the first where I was able to afford my planned build at 50 without relying on outside sources of income. The single-target nature of the Stalker lends itself to completing more missions and arcs than the average character, but I didn't go out of my way to ghost missions for merits, and still took the time to do all of the newspaper and bank missions for Invader. I played this character pretty much every day for a few months, so he didn't get the chance to accrue much patrol XP.

It sounds like the sources of my income were quite different to Nethergoat's, but my results certainly lend credence to the conclusion that a 'casual' player is able to earn plenty of inf for a good to excellent build from just playing the game.

As a side note, after reading numerous debates on this subject over the last couple of weeks I've noticed that the people on the 'casual players' side of the debate almost always turn out to be farmers, who are pretty much the antithesis of 'casual'. I strongly suspect that the true 'casual' player (such as Radium's example above) doesn't actually care one way or the other about the whole thing as long as the core gameplay is enjoyable for them.

Nobody needs the better things in the game. Every single item for sale in Wenworth's or the Black Market that you can't buy outright from another source is a luxury.

It's unfortunate that your cousin can't play as often as he'd like, but come I-17, you can e-mail him a big chunk of INF that will allow him to place bids for goodies that will likely fill during his enforced absences from the game.