There are a bunch of ways to make money at lower levels.
First and "least appealing" is to turn xp off. I think this will yield you more $$...but obviously take away your xp.
Another way(the best way imho) is to utilize the market. Find things that no one is bidding on and bid on those items. Bid low enough so that you can go to the store and sell them for a profit.(note: not selling back at the market but a vender or store, like the Technology store)
You can do this for hours and make money quite easily. It will not make you billions, but it surely can make you millions, and hundreds of thousands in a matter of minutes.
Yet another way is to buy recipes & salvage, craft the recipe with the salvage, then sell the crafted item. This can usually be done for a nice profit. Make sure you check the crafted price before you bid on the recipe and salvage so you know that you will surely make a profit. Do not invest your money unless you can double or triple it.....ymmv.
Good luck, I hope you find the extra $ you seek.
To expand a bit more on what Johnny said, you can buy up level 50 recipes for unwanted sets (stun, sleep, that sort of thing) for maybe 100 influence a piece and vendor them, usually for 5,000 or 10,000 a piece. It's slow, but it's an effective way to earn enough influence to start something more profitable. You can also buy up high level SOs for cheap and vendor them.
The next step up, in my opinion, would be to pick a very popular IO recipe (accuracy, damage, heal, defense) in a mid-range level, say 25, 30, 35, and then put in low bids for salvage to craft it (in stacks of 10, and for the recipes if you can buy them cheap).
Then you craft enough of the two levels needed to earn the memorization badge. You can probably sell what you've crafted at a profit, but once you've memorized the recipe then it's even easier to make a profit.
Important: put in low bids, wait for them to fill overnight. List your recipes for a good price, high enough that you'll make money but not so high that they'll never sell. It can take a bit of practice to get that right. Also, wait a day or two for your crafted IOs to sell.
This kind of crafting can easily net you enough money to outfit characters with whatever generic IOs you want, or with cheaper set IOs. When I did this regularly, I had a couple of characters who worked up over 100 million influence. I thought that was great, until the day I decided I wanted full set-IO builds. Then I had to get into crafting set IOs and leave the generic IOs to other people. ^_^
Another possible option: Run AE missions, use tickets to buy salvage or recipes to sell on the market. It helps to know what recipes and what salvage are worth the most money, but you can do pretty well with just bronze random rolls (for example).
my lil RWZ Challenge vid
Ah, thank you guys very much. I've always been pretty terrible and making money in MMOs so this is a big help!
All of the advice given above is good. Especially the part where you put down bids and leave the market. I want to talk about "levels of money" so you know what your options are and how to get them. .
In theory all you need to play the game is enough money for SO's. This is a million or two every five levels. Once you make a couple million off the market you should be OK for the rest of your career (I think.)
If you go with IO's you can spend a little more money... or a lot more. Depends on what you want. I'd VERY STRONGLY recommend putting 10 million inf or so into a knockback resistance IO (the easiest is probably Karma, which goes in a defense power. That includes hover, combat jumping, stealth. ) Game changing experience for me.
Everything except that is pretty much optional. You can get more performance by spending more money- from 20 million for "frankenslotting" (cheapish stuff that gives better results than SO's) to ... well,potentially there's almost no limit. It's like cars- you can get a $12,000 car, you can get a $60,000 car, you can get a $400,000 car. They all get you there, but some are nicer.
So that's the buying side of the equation.
The making-money side of the equation goes something like this:
* Buying recipes/salvage at Wents and reselling to a store: Around a million an hour. Painfully boring and annoying, but it's guaranteed money- you can't lose money on the deal- and you can do it starting with no money.
* Memorizing generic IO's- 1 to 3 million inf every time you collect your money and craft a new set of IO's and put them up for sale. (You could easily do two or three sets a day without flooding the market.) It is theoretically possible to lose money on this, in the sense that it is theoretically possible for me to become an astronaut.
* Serious Market Stuff (crafting, flipping, etc.) - big money. A million per sale? five million? Twenty? Yeah, you can make that kinda money. You need money to start. You can lose money doing this. You can get stuck with a bunch of stuff nobody wants to buy, which you paid too much for. There is the possibility of going bankrupt. But you can make billions.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Yeah, what Fulmens said. Here's a link, to the ever-helpful ParagonWiki.
This page is for common Damage IO's. There are a lot of interesting things you can see here. First, you can see that at around level 25 or 30, the IO is just as good as an SO. Remember, the IO will never degrade or need to be replaced. You don't need to step up to a level 35 IO just because you got to level 32. You can save a lot of money by buying common IO's at level 30 or so and just keeping them from then on.
The next chunk of data is recipe prices. Level 50 recipes sell for 116k to a vendor. Now go to WW and see what they are selling for on the market. I haven't look for months, and 2xp may have messed things up, but I bet it's no more than 105k, maybe under 100k. So if you put in a bid for 106k on a stack of 10 recipes, you can walk those over to an NPC vendor for a guaranteed profit of 10k each. That's 100,000 inf per stack. Put in the bid just before you log off and see if it has filled when you get back. Less than 5 minutes of actual in-game time and you're 100,000 inf richer. Boring, but effective.
You can also see the crafting cost vs the memorized crafting cost. If you want to buy a damage IO, pick a number between the crafting cost and the memorized crafting cost, and put in a bid. For a level 30 damage IO, 30,000 inf is a nice in between number. Maybe you could add a bit for the salvage. Call it 35k. That's about the same as the cost of an SO. You're probably saying, no way! They're not that cheap! The last five prices are 300,000 inf! Well, yeah, but... try it. Put in a bid for 35k and see what happens. Maybe 55k. Remember, those IO's will never degrade. You could pay five times as much as an SO and it would still be a good deal, but I bet you won't need to. Just let the bid sit for a day or two and see what happens.
The other thing you can see here is the badge requirements. Well, that takes one more click actually. To memorize the Damage IO recipe at level 35, click the link to the Arms Dealer badge. Craft 11 level 35 and 11 level 40 Common Damage enhancements.
Buying those recipes from the table would cost you a bundle, but now you know that you can buy them for about 1/4 that price at WW. So buy those recipes, just the 22 you need, and all the salvage for them. Low bid the salvage and wait over night. Then craft those 22 IO's.
If you're lucky, you can sell them for a profit. Even if you don't, the next ones you craft will be much cheaper. No more recipes to buy, and a big discount on the crafting cost.
A note on lowballing salvage: try putting in a bid for a few inf more than the lowest price in the last five, and then another bid for a price 20% lower than that. After 24 hours, there's a good chance that both will have gone through. Next time, bid the lower amount again, plus another bid for 20% below that. Keep trying lower prices until the bids stop filling. You might be surprised how low the price gets when you're not looking.
Good luck!
Avatar: "Cheeky Jack O Lantern" by dimarie
So, after getting working on another character, I found that influence has been getting very tight, especially with buying DOs and SOs. At first, I thought this odd because my first 50 never seemed to run low on influence while on the path to the level cap. However, I just realized I won a load of costume contests and made a lot of early influence so money was never a problem. So, I was wondering if anyone had any tips about how to make some influence on a level 26 blaster.