How many people believe this?

A couple of things you might not be up on... as nice as fancy inventions can be, you absolutely don't need them to play the game. The game was created and ran a long time before Inventions were added, basically all of the content is designed around on the assumption that you don't have them.

Before we had a market, it was actually somewhat challenging (and fairly widely considered annoying) to keep yourself equipped in Training (TO), Dual-Origin (DO) and Single-Origin (SO) enhancements. However, in today's market world, you can make more than enough to buy those even if you list your drops rather unintelligently on the market. Your most likely bread winners are actually low- and mid-level arcane salvage. These are needed by people who want to craft Common Invention Enhancements, but high-level characters have to go out of their way to obtain such salvage. They tend to throw a lot of money at lowbies for this salvage compared to what lowbies need to be self sufficient.

To get a sense of what's good to sell, the things to look at in the price history are the dates on the last 5 history, the number of bidding, and the number of listings.

In general, something will sell quickly if it has lots of bidders and either few listings or a rapid pace of transaction in the history.

The more of something is for sale compared to its number of bidders, the lower you want to list to ensure you move the item, assuming you bother to sell it at all. A low rate of transaction in the history compounds this - something with lots for sale and a low sale rate is going to be harder to move.

The more bidders there are compared to the number for sale, the more likely you can sell at a high price. If something has a lot of bidders, few for sale, and you list for any price up to something in the last 5 history you're probably guaranteed an immediate sale. If you list for more you still might sell in fairly short order, but possibly not immediately.

Remember, in this market, the buyer buys listing that had the lowest sale price lower than the bidder's price, so selling things fast is about being the lowest price seller. How far down the scale you're willing to go is something of an art. You want to be high enough not to be swept up by people looking for ridiculous bargains but low enough to undercut most everyone else. The more people are bidding and the fewer of the item are for sale, the less likely it is you will be bought by a bargain hunter, and more likely you are to be bought by someone who wants one right now.

UberGuy: rather than quote your whole post, I'll just say -- thanks, this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for and not finding. You are indeed Uber.

It's especially comforting to know that if I can't afford one of those wacky hexagonal doodads for a particular slot, the ones from the store will do me. Huge relief. Some people have been telling me otherwise, which was making me nervous.

Any advice for the confusing (and in my experience so far, common) case where there are thousands selling, none buying, and the last listed prices look like a bomb-test seismograph? That's the kind of thing that makes me pull my hair out.

I mentioned this earlier, but I want to expand on it in case it's not clear to you (Driver 8) as a new player.

The curve in how much characters earn at a given level is not linear with level. It's actually roughly exponential. Near level 50, characters are earning hundreds of times more inf per foe defeated than, say, a level 10. This is then compounded by the fact that near-50s also fight over-level foes more easily, which are worth even more, and can also probably fight and defeat many more foes in the same elapsed time.

At low levels, it probably seems like nonsense to you that anyone would pay so much more than they need to in order to buy something, but compared to you, they are probably making vastly more inf per hour played.

Interestingly, the market was explicitly viewed as a means for such wealthy high-level characters to pour their money on lowbies. This is one of the reasons why certain things only exist at low levels - the primary way for high-level characters to get them was supposed to be buying them from low-level characters. (As an aside, this hasn't worked that well for recipes - the "good" low-level ones are too rare compared to how long characters are at the levels where they drop.)

Hey, another newbie question that this reminds me of:

Is there a limit to what I can craft at a given level, or is it purely a question of what mats and recipes I have?

Driver 8, two points:

1. I want to emphasize that the "what to vendor" rule that you were given for level 10-14 is ONLY for low levels.

There are three "groups" of salvage: low level [1-25], medium [20-40] and high [35-50]. If you're beating guys that are, say, level 22 you will get 50/50 salvage, half low level and half medium level.

There's almost nothing really shiny in the 1-20 range, and so there's not that much crafting that goes on using that salvage. This is why you vendor so much of it. Once you get to midlevel salvage, most of the orange salvage is worth millions.

2. Seebs' question points out a very good way to make money in the low level game. (I made billions on a character who was at level 17 and living in the market at one point.) Craft stuff for high level characters. If the recipe is the slightest bit desireable [details TBD] you can generally sell the crafted IO for at least a million more than the recipe, crafting costs and ingredients. Why? Some people want it now, and don't mind paying.

curiosity killed the goat!


I got to wondering about WoW server populations and found this site.

Hours of fun!

however voluntary and inaccurate, it's better than what we have-
some disgruntled yay-hoo in the Suggestions forum screaming I haven't seen anyone on Protector in three weeks, merge the servers!

=P