how do you "play the auction and other currency questions" also guides pages not working

Yes i did look in the guides section before i made this post, and all of the links in the guide section lead to a page not found on the coh forums.

So i ask my questions here.

Ive heard of people "playing the auctions" as a way of making mass amounts of currency. I would like some tips and tricks on this, as i'm not sure i understand how the auction system in coh works yet. it seems different than other mmo auction houses (namely wow)

Also what are other ways to make currency besides auctions?

yet again i ask because i can't get the guides links to work in the guides section of this market forum.

I just started doing this myself. I'm level 11 (12 if I ever figure out what travel pool to take and log in to train) and have 25 million influence. Basic formula has gone something like this:

Buy Level 35 Damage Resist Common IO recipe for about 5k.
Buy Salvage to craft it for 100k.
Craft it.
Sell it for 600K.

The prices are approximate. Just find something with a cheap recipe and expensive enhancement. Once I had enough seed money together, I made a couple Damage / Acc enhancements from the Focused Smite set. Cost me about 1.15 million in materials and recipes each, sold for 7 million each.

And no, I don't care about giving away the exact ones I used to make money. There are a LOT of enhancements out there, and a LOT of players that want them without wanting to be bothered with crafting them.

If you're really hard up for cash, go to the Recipe -> Other section and look at minimum level 50. Buy any Common IO recipe you can get your hands on for 20k or less, and vendor them for a 40k to 90k profit. Alternatively, buy level 50 SOs for dirt cheap and sell them to the appropriate store.

In a couple hours of doing this, I've gone from zero resources on a fresh account to 25M. Maybe more, things could have sold while I was typing.

*edit* If you're asking about "flipping," it's the basic stock market tactic. Buy low, sell high. Find something with a wide variance of price and not many for sale, pick it up at a fraction of the "going rate," then relist it for whatever you think will sell. This is a patience game: you can't expect immediate returns on this type of item, but the margins can be fantastic and the time invested is minimal.

In fact, the best advice for "playing the market" is patience. All of your profit will come from people that are not willing to wait for a better price. Don't be that guy, or you're spiraling in a self-defeating loop.

The auction system in CoH works as follows.

When you bid on an item, and there are multiple items of that type for sale, you will buy the one with the lowest list price, IF your offer is higher than the list price.

For example, if you place a bid of 1000 influence for a hydraulic piston, and there are 3 hydraulic pistons for sale, listed at prices of 100 influence, 400 influence, and 1000 influence, you will buy the one listed for 100 influence. If on the other hand, the pistons were listed at 2000, 3000, and 4000 influence, you wouldn't buy one at all.

When you are selling an item, and there are already bids out for it, you will sell to the highest bidder, IF your list price is lower than the bid price.

For example, if you list a hydraulic piston at 100 influence, and there are bids standing for 100 influence, 200 influence, and 400 influence, you will sell it for 400 influence, to whoever bid that amount. If, on the other hand, the bids were 10, 20, and 30 influence, you wouldn't sell it at all.

When there are multiple bids/offers for the same item at the same price, which one is bought/sold depends on which one was put on the market first.

When you list an item, it costs you 5% of the list price up front to list it. If you later cancel the listing for some reason, you DO NOT get this money back, so don't list things too high.

When you sell an item, you pay an additional amount of money to bring your total selling fee up to 10% of the sale price (so 10% of the sale price minus the 5% of the list price you already paid).

Bidding on an item does not cost anything.

As far as making money in CoH goes, there are a couple ways to go about it.

1. Farming. This is essentially running the same content over and over to quickly gather rewards and then selling them for inf. People farm recipe drops, architect tickets, and merits. Farming is a fairly complex topic that deserves another discussion altogether. If it's something you're interested in, PM me and I can give you some tips.

2. The Markets. This is essentially making money the same way you do in a real-life stock market, by buying low and selling high. In reality, it breaks down into two strategies.

Flipping: Flipping is when you buy an item for a low price, then resell it at a higher price to make a profit (counting the fact that you lose 10% of the sale price as a market fee).

Crafting/Selling: This is (in my opinion) the easiest way to make money from the markets. Crafted invention origin enhancements often sell for a good bit more inf than the recipes and salvage that they are crafted from do. A shrewd businessman can make good money by buying recipes, crafting them into enhancements, and selling the enhancements at an inflated value. This can be done with common invention origin recipes/enhancements, but it is usually more lucrative to do it with set recipes/enhancements. The latter generally requires a somewhat larger initial investment though.

The metaphor I use is a pinball game. I thought I was doing really well getting scores like 50,000; then I figured out how to get 200,000 . 200,000 seemed really good then I figured out how to get 1.2 million.

With the market, it takes about as much work to make your first million as it does to go from 1 million to 10 million, then 10 million to 100 million. Then it maybe slows down a little. Maybe.

Farming doesn't have to be quite as dire as it comes across in firespray's summary- there is one "Best" way to make money, but there are a couple dozen that are nearly as good. So you don't have to do exactly the same thing over and over, unless "exactly the same thing" is "play the game."

The others have already answered the question but I'd like to emphasise a couple of points.

Remember that the total auction house fee is 10%. Make sure you have bigger profit margins that that.

When people say "be patient", they mean that it's perfectly normal to wait a day or two for something to sell. Slow sellers can take a week or two.

When you pick a listing price, remember that prices change all the time. If you list too high you're likely to be stuck with something that won't sell. If you list close to your break even point then the worst that can happen is that you'll make a small profit instead of a big one. You'll get a decent profit far more often than a poor one.

There was a major forum migration a while back that broke many links. If you go down the stickied FAQ thread a bit you'll find another post from me with updated links. As far as I know, most of those are still good.

Actually, the new forum lets us go back and edit old posts indefinitely, doesn't it? The old forums didn't allow that. I wonder if it will let me edit a post that I made before the forums changed...

...Yes! It let me! I did a quick copy and past into the first post of that thread. I'll go back and do some more detailed work later, but for now you should check out the first post in the stickied Market Guides and FAQs thread. A lot of those links are working now.

It is MORE efficient to play a 50; this is true. But I have run several characters up to 30,33, or 35 (doing lots of task forces) and rolled my merits; usually I make several hundred million this way.

To clarify for the OP: It used to be that when you finished a Task Force or Strike Force [same thing, just hero vs. villainside] you got a special rare recipe. They then changed the system so you got some number of "merits" where you could trade 20 merits for one of those rare recipes, or buy a few other things with them. Longer TF's give more merits, shorter ones give fewer. ("shorter" means "shorter, when done by extremely efficient people", not necessarily "shorter, when done by you or me".) They eventually added merits when you complete story arcs, which you could do by yourself, at your leisure, any time you want.

Because you don't need to convert merits, ever [the limit is enormous] many people didn't even realize they COULD convert merits until sometime after they turned 50; many other people play their 50's far more than their lower level characters. So you end up with very few merits rolled at any level other than 50. One of my hobbies is trying to get more low-level recipes onto the market.

Irritatingly, this scarcity does not mean you get more money for the lower level recipes.

Tangent, but the point is, you CAN make lots of money playing normally or fairly normally on the way to 50.

And an excellent piece of advice someone gave a while back for beginning characters looking to earn inf is hit the Mission Architect.

Salvage and recipes don't start dropping for a while in the 'real' game, but you can stockpile tickets fresh out of the tutorial. The 10-14 Bronze pool is full of garbage, but also has several recipes that are super valuable at really low levels.

Well then, my next question is:

With Ouroboros, can you go back and replay full story lines? With my very first character, created during the head start, I wanted to get every single Souvenir possible. I even perma-debted myself as soon as I could (level 5 those days) so I could hunt more down. It wasn't enough, and I ended up outleveling a lot of content. These days, you'd also be passing up merits by doing a lot of MA and leveling there.

Low level MA arcs I enjoy: 1472, 6017, 58363, 111022, and 230255. Ymmv, of course. Check the MA forum, there might be even more good ones that Im not even aware of.

Edit: I almost forgot 13986, my favorite MA arc. There are some Mu in there, so bring some CaBs with you if youre *low* level, other than that, doubleplus good!

Thanks again for the AE advice. I'm going to look into it today. I'm having a lot of fun with the official storylines though. I wonder if you can use Merits from traditional Story Arcs to make any sort of comparable money on the way up.

I did find this quote on Paragon Wiki:
"All main arcs and most minor arcs can be re-completed through the flashback system in Ouroboros."

So I can always go back for the souvenirs I miss.