How much do you really need?

Pharoah: This is the first time you've asked these questions, but the fiftieth time I've answered them. I'm going to try to resist the temptation to be snarky .

1) I like playing with the market and making imaginary money. Profits are a side effect. Most people use the profits to buy the IO sets they want for their characters. My builds are cheap, so I do things like donate Prestige to other people's bases and fight inflation and bribe people to produce low-level recipes. It's my money, I can do what I like with it.

2) If you are buying common IO recipes, you're doing something wrong. Likewise, if you're unable to afford common IO recipes, you're doing something wrong. You can get crafted common IO's for less than the crafting cost listed on the recipe just by leaving a bid up overnight. (In many cases, you can get it for less than the MEMORIZED crafting cost- some people sell at a loss.)

3) You said "I don't want to have to marketeer". Different people mean different things by "marketeer." If you mean "buy things and resell them" or "Buy things and craft them and sell the product"- which is what MOST people mean- you can make a lot of money without doing that. If you mean "sell anything at Wentworths, ever" you're going to have considerably more of a problem.

4) What we donate to new players, so they feel they have a chance in the market, is knowledge. This thread has at least two examples of people starting with under 100K and going to hundreds of millions. There is no difference between my level 20 character in the market and your level 30 character in the market. [I have a vet reward that gives me a few extra recipes and whatnot- L20 to L30 is about the right ratio, I figure.] We can buy and sell and craft all the same things. You can buy anything I can, for 1 inf more than I can, and my buy price is right there in the last 5 .

5) "I don't want to have to marketeer just to buy the IO sets I want for my character." I'm going to be a little hostile on this. TopDoc said once, on the topic of purples, something like "If you want to slot anything that you didn't get yourself, you're going to have to convince other players to give it to you. Other players can be very unreasonable." That's the situation, really. The market is just a collection of other players, some reasonable and some not*, offering to swap some of THEIR stuff for some of YOUR stuff. If you don't want to give up any stuff, why should anyone give you theirs?

*I include the people selling generic IO's at a loss as unreasonable. It's just unreasonable in the customer's favor.

I tend to invest alot more and corner the market on a item to drive up prices. It can bite u sometime but I have bankrolled spending more for higher end items.

As to what do I do with my profits?

Most of my profits anymore are converted to prestige in a probably futile attempt to cut the increase in the supply of inf in the game (which causes much more inflation than any marketeering). If more people joined Fulmens and me we might have a shot at actually stemming the tide of inflation.

Greed is still good.

I never try to increase prices when I fool around on the market. There's plenty of money to be made with the existing price structures.

Wow. This thread has taken so many turns since I posted the original post. It hardly seems like the same topic.

Intention of thread: To show that a person could indeed become a crafter with nothing more than 1 mil and a bit of knowledge.

Not intended: Give many examples of how to make low end money. This is good information, but we have a ton of resources to that effect now, and I thought I would just poke this out there for new people who are wondering how much they really need to get started with the crafting side of marketeering.



Answering some questions:

What do I do with my inf?

I give it away. I spend it on characters I have and I have fun with it. It is a game within a game to me. Some people really like farming. I do this *shrug*


"I don't want to have to marketeer"

So ummm, don't? No one said you have to. There are 3 ways to get inf in this game. Beg for it (lame). Kill critters (they give you inf for free - no begging!). Or convince other people to give you their inf. The last one you do through the market. Every time you sell something, you are doing this. You can either choose to be effective at it, or not. Personally, it doesn't matter one bit to me if you choose to be good at it or not.


The whole "cross server" thing and my comment on Freedom:

You have to stand somewhere when you look at the market interface. I originally picked freedom as I had little interest in leveling that character any more. However, after losing 30% of my vision (due to eye-bleeding auras and such) and acquiring audio mad cow disease - as well as the constant bombardment of tells and invites to SGs / teams (yes, both were on auto decline) I relocated my market machine to Champion. I now sit in Steel Canyon and relish the silence and non-eye bleediness.

In fact, while on Freedom, it was the first, and only time, I created a tab that was entitled "Silence". It had 0 channels active in it. It was bliss


Thank you for the tips on purples. I put my toes in the water. We'll see if I can convince myself to jump in at some point.

So... a bit over a month later.

Same principals being used.

Same niches being worked.

Same practices in place (general laziness)*.

I hit over a billion on this toon today.

I'd say that's enough proof that you can start crafting with as little as 1 mil.

I do believe one day I will get ambitious enough to actually make the prestige needed to buy an IO table and crafting table for my base. Right now its 2 sad empty rooms lol.

If I can get ambitious enough to do that, I may create a bit of an assembly line type deal with it. But prolly not. lol


*General laziness: I bid the exact same thing for every recipe I purchase. I list every single IO for the exact same price. I bid either 5,555 or 55,555 on my salvage. If I don't get the salvage by the end of my market session (usually less than 5 minutes) I pick it up the next day. I have exactly 24 niches I work. Bet you can't guess how I arrived at that number, can you? (4 sets of 6)



Edit: Realized that I had the start date wrong - changed "less than a month" to "bit more than a month"

One of my friends, who's been playing since ~2004, has about a billion inf.

I might have a billion among my toons too. (Just checked my little chart of who has what; 1,031 million total among 19 toons.) I'm still not very good at this, and I'm not yet very consistent about picking niches. I tend to be driven a bit more by stuff like "I want this". So, for instance, I have a ton of bids out on lowbie kismet +6% recipes, and I sell overflow but mostly I did that so all my lowbies could have +6% to-hit as soon as possible. The couple hundred million I've made on impeded swiftness damage procs is all overflow from my demons MM wanting to put one in the demon prince.

How much do you need to start marketeering, basically nothing.

Take a level 1, level it to 10 in MA, at 10 cash in your tickets for bronze. More often than not, you will have a -KB or a res/def.

Buy rare set recipes from useless sets at level 50 from the AH and vendor them. This will get you your first million or so in a short while and give you the capital to list what you drop.

Sell the first expensive IO you get at a slightly lower prioce than you normally would for a quick sale, and you're up and running.

Crafticus has made 50+ million in his pursuit of Field Crafter, the majority of it in pursuit of badges, so not affected by the crafting discount.

The profits aren't what I'm used to (my marketeers often clear 50m+ on a single sale), but in context people paying me 2-800k for something that cost me a handful of inf is a pretty sweet markup.