A thank you

I just want to write a little note of Thanks!! to all the folks here on the Market Forum, and especially Fury Flechette.

Everyone, the tips and explanations here are top notch. You guys couldn't be making it any easier for anyone with half a brain and less motivation to make as much money as they want.

Fury, your 1 billion in 7 days thread inspired me to really apply myself to this. I started brand new yesterday. Having not played in years, I rolled up a brand new character and set about wondering how I was going to be able to afford decent enhancements at 22. Then I read your thread. Now I'm 10 hours of playtime in, most of it spent /afk reading forums, and have nearly 2 million influence at level 6. If I had been smarter and not made some poorly researched purchases, I'd have twice that. Before I even made this character I went through and deleted all my old characters on every server, because I wanted to really experience it fresh. So this is with no seed money whatsoever.

So, my hat's off to you, marketeers. You're making this game a better place.

No, no, no. You've got it all wrong! Marketeers are actually good for the game because...

Oh, wait.

And people still complain it's hard. With level 50 characters!

Good job on proving them wrong, heff!

Thanks for the compliment.

It always seemed amazing to me that we get posters in here that accuse of outright greed, deluge us with their unworkable ideas about how to "fix" the market, or best yet accuse us of organizing some sort of secret cabal which manipulates the market to keep the little guy downtrodden.

It's this sort of tinfoil hat extremism that made me undertake the 7 days experiment in the first place. Largely, because my experiences with the market were so completely different from what people were claiming theirs were like. The experiment really never was intended as a guide, and I continue to be highly flattered that many continue to think it is.

The attitude of the folks in this forum (me included) is not one of exclusion but of inclusion: I'm hoping that with the constant barrage of testimony like yours, that one day one of the naysayers will pause for a second and cross the line to join our not so-exclusive circle.

EDIT: Looks like I'll have to either repost the Market Journal to either the Player Guides sections, have the mods move it over there or perhaps maybe campaign to have it made a sticky.

Oh, I wasn't using it as a guide, simply inspiration. It would make an excellent guide, were you to repost it sequentially and cleaned up a bit.

No, most of my money has come from selling Salvage (no research, throw it on at vendor price and take what I get), vendoring under priced recipes and SOs, and crafting some high turn over, "low" margin common IO25s. I saw "low" in the most relative sense: I'd kill to think of 100% mark-up as a low margin in any other market.

The mistakes I've made have actually been trying to emulate your money-making style without enough patience, experience, or knowledge. I something like 15M in various IO, set and common, that are clogging my slots because I tried to go for something higher margin without really understanding what the demand was. Just because there are 100 bidders, 1 seller, and 5 sales today at the same price doesn't mean you're guaranteed a sale.

The market community in this game is really refreshing. I played the market in WoW, and it was the most cut throat, awful community imaginable. Ten times worse than anything you guys get accused of, and PROUD of it to boot. Maybe that's why you folks get so much hate. Oh well, haters gonna hate no matter what you do.

Oh, and as to my progress: I created the character less than 24 hours ago. I'm almost level 10. I have 3M in liquid Inf, and another 15 to 20 in moveable IOs. Only a matter of time before they convert back to cash.

I'd like to also throw in a 'thank you' to Fury Flechette. I thought your experiment was extremely eye opening and just goes to show what you're able to accomplish, even as a casual player looking to make a bit of extra cash. I agree it is a great source of inspiration.

(A little context for my perspective: prior to reading through the experiment, I wasn't someone who focused much on the market, but more so a 'sell whatever comes my way' type of person. Even with that mentality, I've never felt it was particularly difficult to make enough influence to fund whatever my current project was at the time. What was striking to me about the experiment was how little effort it would be to take things to the next level. I've since then put a little extra time into the market and seen similar results in just a week's time. I wanted to share this to highlight the fact that these concepts can be useful to many types of players in different circumstances and with varying mentalities about the market.)

My success continues. Started the day with 14M liquid, currently have double that and lots more waiting to sell. I spent 2 hours total on the market today. Long joyous expulsion below that is mostly me talking about how I've taken all the great advice in this forum to heart.

I'm solidly into buying cheap recipes and crafting them into expensive enhancements. I simply cannot fathom that some people will pay as much as 10x the component cost on these things. I noticed something interesting, to: It's actually cheaper to buy Common IOs at level 12 from the market than it is to buy DOs at 12 and 17. If you compare the cost of keeping your DOs at +3 so they give almost the same effect as IO15s, it's a landslide. Sure, it's small game stuff, but you have to be able to make a profit on the small game if you want to play the big game.

I've been limited to 3 slots available for most of today because I have 8 tied up bidding for IO15s. To work within that limitation, I've started to home in on some real time-savers. Picking a set price to buy most Salvage at has been the real winner. Sure, I might spend an extra 10k crafting an enhancement, but when it sells for 5M does 10k even matter?

The other winners are picking a mark-up, and learning the interface better. With a set mark-up, I can quickly add up the recipe and salvage costs in my head to rough out what I should post it for. Then it's a simple matter of comparing whatever I come up with to what the past 5 have sold for to decide if it's worth the investment. So far, all of my prices have come in less than half the "going rate," while still doubling my investment. Sure, a few pieces have sold for millions less than I could have made. My thinking is doubling my investment on every sale is better than I could do in any other market, and the turn-over must be faster because I'm likely one of the lower prices available. Most of the time, even listing very low, pieces sell at the rate of the last 5.

Learning the interface has also been HUGE for me. It took me almost 20 minutes yesterday just to find something worth crafting. This morning I spent 15 minutes doing nothing but investigating all of the sorting options, and now I can hone in on a worthwhile investment in under a minute with a little luck.

I feel like I'm playing EQ before the Bazaar again, when I could get away with HUMONGOUS mark-ups on Jewelcrafting because it was rare to find a high level crafter and I was willing to travel to where ever you wanted to make your purchase. Contrast that to WoW, where only the most rare and esoteric crafted items were at all profitable, and even then you'd need to sell hundreds to generate significant income.

Someone should appoint Fury as official Market Forum Liaison with the greater CoH community.

Up to 63M on hand. Made my first big-ticket sale today: a Touch of Death Dam/End/Rech for 25M. Well, big ticket for me anyway, pretty sure it's small beans and beneath the nostice of most people in this forum . I'm averaging about a 60% profit margin, which is insane. For every Influence I spend, I'm getting 2.5 back. My Influence is tripling every other day. This is despite listing strictly at a 75% mark-up over cost. Whoever bought that Touch of Death payed me 10M more than I was asking for it. Double-blind consignment is such a wonderful thing!

The thing that amazes me most is it almost doesn't matter the initial investment or turn-over rate, I get the same percentage ROI. The only reason I'm even looking at slower, more expensive pieces now is because I just don't enough auction space to employ any significant portion of my capital on the cheap and fast uncommons that have gotten me this far.

Another small update. It's been 5 days since I returned to the game, and I'm sitting on 200 million. It struck me a few minutes ago that this is 10% of the influence cap. In 5 days with no market experience on a fresh account with no outside help, I'm at 10% of the cap. Income keeps climbing, too, keeping pace with my capital.

I'm trying out AE ticket random rolls for the first time today. It almost seems like a TON of work for not much payoff at my level of 16.

With AE tickets, I wait until I'm level 35-40 or so, not just because that's the best range for recipe options, but just because at that point I have a large number of recipe storage slots. At 16, running to the market, checking what's selling, checking salvage, then vendoring a small pile feels like a bit of a waste.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

By far the highest RoI I get, percentage-wise, is bidding ~100 inf on level 45 common IO recipes and vendoring them, but this doesn't produce very much money by real standards.

With all the freespecs coming up, I'm wondering whether I should be looking to buy a bunch of enhancements I don't need, super cheap (you can get 45-50 enhancements for 100-200 inf if you're a little patient), stash them in various toons' enhancement drawers, then freespec. :P

But it seems like it might be wiser to, you know, save those for a time when I actually want to change my spec.

Good stuff heffroncm, welcome back to the game! I'm glad you decided to give the market a fair shot.

Couple quick tips:

1. Don't worry if you make a bad investment and just break even or possibly lose a few million. It happens sometimes and you'll make it back quick enough.

2. If you find something that is moving really fast and for good profit(recipe for 1million and enhancement sells for 15million several times a day) I wouldn't buy more than ten at a time. You may own that niche for a few days, but eventually more people will catch on and you'll see your profits start to fall for that item. Basically, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Thanks for the tips MunkiLord!

1) I actually haven't lost Inf on any investment yet. Only time. I'm getting to where I value time and slot space more than RoI.

2) I've been taking the advice to diversify very seriously. I never have less than three different IOs listed at a time. Right now I have four listed, and I'm lowballing recipes for a fifth. I also don't go more than 5 of anything, no matter how "hot" it looks.

Basically I start from the premise that others have probably spotted it and started moving on it before I do, and try to get some sort of profit before the price crashes

One IO I'm listing right now defies my understanding: the profits have increased substantially since I started listing it a few days ago. Originally I would list at 2x cost like most everything, and get 4x cost back most of the time. I'm getting closer to 12x cost back on most sales now that I've been keeping a constant supply up for the past few days. It doesn't make sense!

That could be because somebody moved out of that niche when their profits started falling leaving you with less competition. Just a guess, but a possibility.

The "small game" is over so FAST though. I'm still teaching myself not to care about 100K here and there, because out of 250M it just doesn't matter. I need to find more expensive game, too. I keep going with the same things, but I'm only able to invest a fraction of my capital at this point.

If I'm PO'd about something, and the rest of the team has also just gone to the hospital and I have about 60 seconds before they notice I'm late... yeah, I'll bid half a million for a large inspiration. I got to show back up with an unfair advantage NOW. Ya know?

nothing to see here.