A Market Journal: From 0 to Millions

I'm guessing 1,569,569569 influence.

Is there a prize for being closest? Maybe the influence you earned?

Oh its per day, well less then that then. That would be my guess for the total.

Alrighty, My second guess shall be.....hold on. I gotta take care of something.

(STOP THROWING SOCKS AT ME! I told you I would put in your bid. What? Yes I know you are awesome. No, I am not typing all this down. Seriously, why socks? Ok Ok. Sorry. SHeesh!)

926 million.

(You know that's lower than my bid yesterday? Well, I just feel that she has a lot of ability and potential. Have you seen her earnings so far? I dunno. I guess I just have more faith in my fellow players. HARUMPHHHMPH *Spits sock out of mouth* Not cool dude.)

Mara Blaze/Furious Jade:
First guess 494 Million
Second guess 725 Million
Third guess 872 Million


Zhang Le/Obsidian Blood's guess is (he's pestering me from 3 feet away to post his guess)
first guess 946 Million
second guess 1 Billion 3 Million
third guess 1 Billion 300 Million

On a plus note. Went from 20 million to 340 million on one of my Fire/Rads tonight and from 240 to 450 million on my other. What a difference roughly 400 little merits can make!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Day 3 - Starting inf: 227,963,856, Ending Inf: 180,589,984



As I eluded in my earlier posts, today's sales activities were far lower than the frenetic pace that was the weekend. Further, despite my best efforts, I was able log on only once during the day after being able to play about 40 minutes before work. Because of this, I wasn't able to micro-manage as well as I did on Sunday and I was left by lunch time with a number of market slots which had sold IOs but no replacement stock.

By lunch time, influence had spiked to around 265M and if this had been a weekend day, expectations of reaching perhaps 500M would not be unrealistic. However, I suspected that Monday sales would slow, and so I decided to use much of my depleted market slots to take another gamble.

I talked before about how I have been limited by the number of slots that my character possessed. The number of slots directly affect how much throughput your character can have. I've never marketed much with Boreal and she had exactly 16 slots, the default number for a level 50 who hadn't earned any more. With this limit, one of the ways that you can increase your earnings throughput is by trying to eke out as much profit per slot. I did that on the weekend by logging in (even with small time increments) and making adjustment and replenishing sold stock. That way, slots were able to have multiple profit making transactions per day.

The other way to get more throughput is to engage in transactions that will garner more profit for each transaction. This evening, I decided to go ahead and shift towards this strategy and invested in a number of recipes which were expensive (50M+ each) but could make tens of millions per each one sold. I actually don't favor this strategy most of the time, and am content usually just cycling over transactions that make 5 to 15M per slot. The high volume, moderate profit strategy is pretty underrated and I've used that strategy before to great success.

However, with the time deadline looming, I thought that this change in strategy was warranted. If I succeed with it, I should have monster sales in the next couple of days. Time will tell.

Also, after work, I leveraged my favorite AE map again and earned around 1600 tickets (1 clear, and 1 partial clear). Due to price spikes on some salvage, I spent around 300 of that in buying level 26-40 salvage. Spell Inks, Demonic Blood Samples, Circuit Boards, Scientific Theories have all spiked in the last couple of days and I wanted a bit of buffer in case I wanted to craft something NAO!! and not tie up a crucial market slot.

I also managed to get some very good rolls. This is what I had left after deleting the junk. The next couple of days could be monstrous...in a good way.

Also, one clarification:

While I don't want to dampen enthusiasm, please limit yourself to one guess per day. If you've missed the posts for day 1 and 2 already, you don't get three guesses unfortunately, just one for day 3 and future guesses for the coming days (which should be made during that day). I do want to give an advantage to those posters who have guessed early since they guessed with less information. I'm also going to not count guesses made in advance. So, sorry, you don't get to make your guess for day 5, 6 and 7 today, though I'll start taking day 4 guesses after this post.

I think around 1.44 billion would be about right

1.45 billion!

1.234 billion (day 3 guess)

guess for day 4: 878,000,000 (878M)

I'll stick with my 667 million.

1,111 million

Third: 601 million
fourth: 640 million

908 million. Cause that's my market signature.

I'm gonna go with a more moderate guess today: 837 mill.

Oh wait, you said 4 guesses today: 637 mill., 737 mill., 937 mill.

871 million is my guess for day 4.

Day 4 Guess: 772 Million.

865 million

Day 4 - Starting inf: 207,103,840, Current Inf: 291,152,688

So day 4 starts off with a little bit of recovery from the investments made in day 3. None of the huge profit IOs sold over night, but that was to be expected. Many of the high priced items don't necessarily sell that fast unless you're selling at very reduced rates.

Late last night as I was checking on prices just before going to bed, I had an IO sold and was invited into a kill all ITF with friends. The 207,103,840 total that I start day 4 reflects influence from kills, salvage/recipes sold off from drops during the TF and one IO (Steadfast Res/End) which sold right before I logged off. It's why I'm starting at 207M instead of 180M.



The ITF was a decent influence earner but probably the worst one for drops that I had for a very long time. I didn't get any rare salvage, no purples and the only recipe drops I got were a temp power (recovery serum) and a tohit debuff generic recipe. So there isn't going to be any uber purple recipe to help me out this time.

Also, just in case you're wondering, I have the star because the leader d/c'ed briefly during the start of the second mission, giving me the star. Also, the team played like maniacs, hence the high death rate...no one was concerned whether we'd win, but rather how maniacally we could kill everything that moved.

Anyway, going to this morning, a number of IOs sold over night, and I crafted and almost insta-sold several IOs. You can see the overnight sales below. Among those that sold right away:

Steadfast Res/Def (two of them) for 25,555,555 each
Basilik's Gaze Acc/Rech (recipe not crafted) for 10,123,123



After collecting all the profits and subtracting costs for salvage and listing fees, I ended up with 291,152,688. I'm hoping that one of the big profit IOs sells with today's busy cycle, which typically starts around 5 PM Eastern and lasts around 12 PM Eastern. After that the market activity decreases severely until the next day. Tuesdays also tends to be another slow day with activity typically picking up starting on Wednesday.

EDIT - one note about flippers: As some of you have already figured, the Steadfast Res/Def and Basilik's Gaze were most likely bought by a flipper. The Steadfast prices were particularly telling since I got the exact same price 25,555,555 both times. Some marketeers are put off by this because what it reflects (correctly) is that the IO probably had a higher profit margin, and the flipper is buying at a point where they can relist the IO and still make a profit. This sort of thing doesn't bother me in the slightest.

First of all, I'm in a hurry. I've already accepted the fact that I'll take moderate profits now rather than trying to eke out 30% more profit but tying up a slot. Second, flipping has some inherent risks. The market for the particular IO may crash from someone flooding the market with that particular IO with IOs from base storage. I've literally seen situations where the supply for an IO went from 10 to 90 overnight, crashing prices. Third, the flipper makes profit by essentially being patient. While they don't craft anything on their own, they do in a sense "pay" for their investment by tying up a slot, sometimes for weeks, in trying to make enough profit to justify the purchase price and the higher listing fees they pay. Since I'm only doing this for 4 more days, time is a precious commodity to me.

I've gotten several PMs asking me about the super secret farm that I use to generate those AE tickets. 1200 tickets per run sounds like a lot to some people, and to generate that in about 40 minutes, I must be using super secret techniques and obviously exploiting game mechanics.

I've been up front in saying that the "farm" I've been using is nothing more than an AE mission I cooked up in about 5 minutes of time. Anyone could create the same mission in the same amount of time. However, to appease those people who are still convinced that I know some super secret that I haven't revealed yet, I'm going to detail exactly the steps I use to create the farm.

Step 1: Start up Mission Architect. Fill out required fields for Story, Description and Contact.



Step 2: Pick an enemy group (Axis America because they're patsies), a map (City 02) and write the required mission dialog (Intro Dialog, Send Off Dialog, etc.).



Step 3: Pick a mission objective (Collection Mission) and choose a Collection Object (I chose Bomb, but you can choose anything). Click Save and then Publish it.



What this mission gets you is a map that can generate up to 1500 tickets (max for AE) with an objective that ends as soon as you click on the Collection Object which shows up as a glowie. To max out the tickets, you beat up on the Council until you get 750 tickets and then click the glowie. The completion award will double the amount of tickets you collected so far up to the 750 ticket limit.

With a competent farming type character, you can set your difficulty to +2/x8/no bosses and get 750 tickets in about 15 minutes. Boreal on the other hand can't handle a difficulty that high, so I set difficulty at +1/x4/no bosses and a complete clear of the map yields around 600 tickets with the mission complete doubling that to 1200.

Anyways, now you know my super duper, ultra secret AE farming technique. To those who missed by bad attempts at sarcasm: I have no super secret technique.

Finally, just to prove it isn't the mission, I will be using only Dev Choice or Hall of Fame story arcs for the remainder of the experiment if I need to generate any more AE tickets.

I'll still stick with my 667 million.

I love this thread... Very curious about the results (I guess 542 million). Kudos for the due diligence.

On behalf of the AE community I would like to thank you for showing everyone too dumb to figure it out for themselves how to clog up the AE interface with yet more copies of the same farm.