A Market Journal: From 0 to Millions

Say hello to Boreal Haze, my level 50 Ice/Ice Blaster on Virtue.



Boreal will be your hostess on what I hope will be an interesting and entertaining journey from the poor house to the rich house. As you can see from the screen shot, Boreal is rather light in funds. In fact, she has 0 influence to her name.

Over the next week (7 calendar days), I will catalog my efforts on making her as rich as possible. There are some players out there who think it's impossible to make gobs of influence, and I'm hoping my little experiment will convince them otherwise.

Some things you should know:

1. Boreal Haze is almost strictly single target oriented. While she has ice storm and blizzard as AoEs, her main methods of attack will be her single target blasts. I purposely chose Boreal for this experiment because she's as far from a farming character as I could think of.

2. I have limited time. Due to a shift in work schedule, I will be working 5 days out of the next 7, which means my gaming schedule will be severely limited. At most, I might be able to play 2 hours a day. Most likely, far less than that.

3. I will not twink / transfer / borrow any influence to alter Boreal's earnings. She'll start with 0 and earnings will be from playing the game (regular missions, AE, TFs, etc.) and playing the market. Since, I'm going to try to maximize earnings as much as possible, I will probably be using AE and the market quite a bit.

4. Here's the entertaining part. I invite you to guess on how much influence she'll have at the end of the 7 days. The person who is the closest will win whatever I earn. Guesses should be in 1M increments and you cannot have the same answer as a guess previous used. So if someone guesses 50M, you're free to guess 49M or 51M but not 50M. You can make one guess per day.

Anyway, good luck and stay tuned.

160 million... my guess.

675M inf is my guess, and I would not be surprised at all if it was low.

playing AND marketeering you should be able to make a pile.
starting from 0 is a fairly big handicap, though.

7 days, light play schedule, mixed game types, starting from scratch, no idea how optimally you're slotted......hmm, I'll be conservative and say 76 million.

Hmmm... This looks like an entertaining experiment.

I'm going to go with 750 million.

hmm....
I really have no clue how facile you are with the market. Actually, I don't even have a clue how much I might be able to earn if I had to start from zero.

I'll guess 205 million.

1.2b

Ok, this looks like a fun experiment to watch.

My guess is 213 Million.

14 hours play for an already built ice blaster craft and sell ?

Between
1 bill and 1.5 billion.

525 million

Thank you, Champion.

Day 1 - Staring inf: 0, Ending inf: 21,087,948

The strategy of day 1 was to generate startup capital. To generate capital you ironically need capital, preferably lots of it. As Boreal was starting from 0, she needed to beat up on some bad guys before she did anything on the market.

So off she went to my favorite capital generator, Architect Entertainment. I quickly setup a farming mission with my favorite group of patsies, Axis America Council on the infamous "Mynx" map and set my difficulty to +1/x4/no bosses. One full clear of the map took around 40 minutes and it was rather difficult, with Boreal ending up in the hospital a couple of times and going out to refill on inspirations.

However, a clear of the map generated 2,582,104 influence and 1,164 AE tickets. I converted the AE tickets into level 10-14 bronze rolls. I picked this range and this category because a) if I got something worthwhile, it would likely be something level 30 and below and I needed to keep crafting costs low, b) the level range is pretty underrated and I was hoping for one of the big hitter recipes (one of the -kb recipes, Steadfast Res/Def, Regen Tissue or Basilik's Gaze).

Of the recipes, I rolled, I got a lot of junk (confuse recipes, taunt recipes = instant trash) but I ended up with a few sellable ones. I saved some tickets for salvage, bought the rest on the market and crafted the following:

Level 25 Bonesnap Acc/Dmg
Level 25 Salvo Acc/Dmg
Level 30 Eradication Dmg
Level 30 Kismet Def/End
Level 30 Regen Tissue Heal/End
Level 30 Steadfast Res/End
Level 30 Steadfast Knockback protection

After buying salvage and crafting everything, I found that I didn't have enough to list everything I crafted. Grrr.



This meant I still needed more capital. So off to AE I went again to do another clear of the farm I had setup. This time around, the clear of the map generated 2,232,010 influence and 1,032 AE tickets. The tickets were then exchanged for level 10-14 bronze rolls.

This was the result:



As you can see, there was a lot of junk but all three of the Steadfasts were very sellable. Ultimately, I ended up keeping only the three Steadfasts and the Bonesnap Dmg/End. They were crafted and listed. While I was listing it, the Salvo Acc/Dmg I mentioned above sold for 555,555 influence. I listed the Steadfast Res/Def for 19M (way below the going rate) and it sold for 22,555,555.

Below is the picture of the day's take:



So in about 2 hours and 20 mins of play, Boreal now had a comfortable cushion of 21,087,948 influence with 9 more crafted IOs yet to be sold.

Damn, good thing I didn't get in on this because I woulda been WAY off. I was guessing you'd be at 30 million by the end of day 2.

This could be interesting with you starting from nothing. I made 1.9B in 16 hours over the course of one week a month ago from running two missions I had in PI and just selling the drops. I did have 100M in the bank so that allowed me to "Buy it Nao" on my salvage and the RNG was extremely nice to me that week with four purples. I crafted and sold anything currently selling for over 10M and sold everything else for 5 inf. I sold no salvage over that week, just used it for the recipes I dropped and no other marketing was done.

Due to the randomness of it all, I am throwing my hat in for 700M

I'll guess 666 million. Because marketeering is ebil, so someone has to.

Going with 1 billion.

You've already made as much in one day as I might make in a week if I was both lucky and managed to maintain focus on one character.

Was it really necessary to craft the Steadfast, though? Seems like the recipes alone were going for as much or more than that last I checked.

384 million.

896m.

I'm going with...ehm 667 million.

Neat idea for a thread.

I'll go with 347 million, for the heck of it.

Aw hell. I should have known better than to try and guess the amount using my own experience. Even putting tips from Fury and Nethergoat into play I can't ever seem to make as much as others.

1337 million. Just because marketeering is l33t bizniz.

Day 2 - Starting inf: 21,087,948, Current Inf: 50,806,306

Just a quick update counting profits before heading to work. I'll detail how the 21M doubled over night later this evening or perhaps earlier if I can get away from work for a bit.

Please note that day 2 is far from done, but I'll be mostly offline.

Those Steadfast -kb IOs sold really fast, and I put some of that 21M (from day 1) to work already.