Want to take my Marketeering to the Next Level

Alright, let me first start off by saying that I am in no way a genius of the market. Most of my marketeering comes from buying recipes cheap in bulk (10-20 at a time), and reselling them for a huge profit (I've made as much as 10x what I paid for, making 200+mil inf in 2 days).

However, my niches have disappeared recently, as more and more people are realizing that there's no reason for recipes to be 1/10 the price of the crafted IO, and have been spending a lot more time buying recipes. This has made my money-making slightly harder now.

I'm resorting to farming my brains out in AE, which can make plenty of money, but it's not surefire. I've rolled ticket cap 3 times in a row and gotten a total of 10mil worth of stuff. (I did silver 34-39 for the first 2, then silver 30-34 for the last one). Granted, that's not normal. Most of the time I see a Kinetic Combat roll into my recipe bank, or some other IO that's going to net me 30+mil everytime I ticket cap.

The problem is, I want money. Fast. I want to be able to fill my storage base with expensive IOs, so that when my friends say "Hey, does anyone have X IO? I need it to finish my toon." Now, if that happens to be an Oblit 4-count, perfect! I've got 6 in my base right now. However, I ran through my 12 LotGs quickly as I made a couple new toons and needed to build them out. I also just used my last Numina proc, and have also used a couple more expensive IOs.

So I come to you, the brilliant money-makers of this game, for help. I have an SS/Fire Brute on both my main account and my second account. The first one has tier 3 everything incarnate. The other one is... Well, I've been too busy using him to PL 2 new toons to mess with his incarnate stuff... I can farm quickly, I can clear Fire Cyborgs pretty quickly, but that repetition gets insanely boring sometimes. I'd love to just walk up to the market, spend an hour or two a day putting stuff up, bidding on stuff, and going and enjoying other game content.

So besides finding niches and buying bulk and selling for tons more, what are some of the other ways you guys all put money in to get money out? I know a popular method is by buying and cornering certain common salvage, however that takes a long time and many different characters to achieve. I was hoping there are some other methods to achieve said influence inflow. I do realize I need to do some damn tip missions and start accumulating some hero merits to help with influence inflow, and I really have no excuse, as my main tank (Shield/Dark) could blaze through 5 tip missions in 20-25 minutes at most.

And as of right now, if I put all my inf together on all my toons, I'd have somewhere around 1.8bil (I was up over about 2.5, but I've spent a lot on toons recently and haven't made all of it back.) if that helps in deciding what would be best for me to invest in. I'd appreciate any and all help you all can give me.

Step 1: Forget Silver rolls.

Seriously, look the tables up! Almost all of the good/high inf stuff in Silver IS ALSO IN BRONZE, and the ratio of expensive stuff to garbage is way lower than the ticket difference. You'll end up spending time deleting said trash, but I have found that it is a much more effective use of tickets and time. If you're NOT wanting to spend a lot of time at it, just go gold. There's a pretty decent chance to get something great, if quality > quantity (and spending less time at the ticket guy) is your thing. If you're okay with having wasted the last 10 minutes, and don't want to mess w/ having to sort out the trash, it's a pretty decent way to make money.

/wall


As for marketeering - definitely a very effective way of making money. It's not "productive" like farming - you're not actually generating anything to put on the market - but it's quick cash. Just keep doing what you're doing, expand to more toons when you've got the inf to do so!

I make all my money crafting respec recipes and rocket boots.

If you have multiple accounts (which I think you said you do) set up AFK PvP IO farms.

The more accounts you have, the quicker you'll make money. And the best part, you do it while you wouldn't normally be playing.

That's one thing I've been told to do by a couple of friends. I definitely need to set up a PvP farm, and make some money that way.

Otherwise, I guess I'm doing what everyone else does (which I guess is why my niches disappear so quickly nowadays) and will keep on keeping on.

Never done any sort of farming, aside from the market type. Good hunting!

This is all from memory, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or things have changed.

Actually the results of my farming analysis back in the day was that about half of the Inf earned in total was from purples. I believe purples have increased in price significantly since then, so purples probably account for 65-75% of Inf earned by farming. Obviously that means you should never farm mobs that don't drop purples.

I did an analysis of tickets, and posted an article long ago titled "Silver is for Suckers". Silver recipes are a combination of uncommon mob drops and mission complete drops. Most of the mission complete drops are garbage. Bronze drops have a moderately high chance of being silver, and you only get uncommon mob drop silvers. By buying only Bronze recipes, you get about the same number of Silver uncommon mob drop recipes as you would if you just bought Silver, but you also get a large number of Bronze drops. All of those Bronze drops are worth far more than the mission complete Silvers. The only drawback of this is that you can end up with a large number of moderately valuable recipes. You may spend more time that it is really worth crafting and selling them.

You can play games with Salvage to make large profits, but it hurts non-filthy-rich people so I won't say how.

PvP IO farming is definitely a good way to make a huge amount of Inf, if past performance is any indication of future returns. I've been doing it for quite a while with my 2 accts. Near the end of the last AE exploit (the Great Monkey Burn), I sold off most of my stock. I'm now sitting on 44B in cash in the Market, and that's after spending a lot. I've since retired from marketeering and non-PvP-IO farming. Unfortunately there are problems with PvP IO farming including the initial investment, uncertain results, and the uncertain market.

You need to find out how to do it, then either respec or level up chars from scratch, and then see if you can even do it. If you have a flakey ISP, so sorry. I moved off Freedom due to the farm crashers, so good luck if you're there. The Devs have done a number of changes designed to make farming PvP IOs more difficult, so it's a cat and mouse game. There are still plenty of mice farmers getting their cheese, but you may need to restart or give up each time things change. With 2 accts you'll probably get around 1 per day on average. If it's a Glad Armor: +3% Def, that's 2B. Or perhaps you'll want to keep that. If it's a Fury of the Gladiator or Javelin Volley, that's chump change. In short, it can take a while to begin production, it can be hard to maintain production, and there is a huge variance in production.

Who are you selling to? Some PvP IOs are great for PvE, so those will always have a big market. (Of course those are the ones you generally keep for yourself.) But most PvP IOs are bought mainly by PvPers. The Devs don't have a great track record on attracting or holding PvPers. One of these days someone will discover another AE exploit, PvPers will exploit it massively for a while, and PvP IO prices will go back up to their silly levels. Or maybe the Devs will make a change that will draw in lots more PvPers. But until then, most PvP IO prices will be just meh compared to what people remember. I have 4 Glad Jav Procs sitting in the Market listed for nearly 2B, because that's how much they were worth a while ago. Do you want to sell now, or wait for the next bull market? How well can you predict the Market? PvP IOs are not a steady income like most other forms of farming.

Well, TopDoc, since you're not on Freedom anymore... mind sharing some tips to help me exploit the Freedom market? *saucer eyes*

But it was an excellent try, wouldn't you say?

I don't make my money creating artificial shortages. Either I don't have the guts or ... something, because every few months I forget, and I try it again, and I lose a couple hundred million and back out.

I've made money wrecking OTHER people's artificial shortages, though...

Wish i could make enough money to lose a couple of hundred mill lol

Everest: the only thing that's stopping you is your unwillingness to read the dozens of guides here and apply them. Seriously, it's like late-night-infomercial easy. Sell twenty things, make 10 million on each of them. (Yes, as has been pointed out, it's not QUITE as easy as "pick something at random, buy it, craft it, sell it" but lord, it's not that much harder.)

Edited to give a starting place.

I've had to adjust my marketing strategies over the last several months as the bottom has fallen out of some niches and others that always seemed too expensive to bother with have become cheaper.

I used to make a lot of money off of "low end" but popular damage sets like Mako's, Scirocco's, Touch of Death, Decimation, Devastation. A lot of that has very low profit margins right now, and I've moved "up" to things like Oblits and defense/resist sets like Reactive Armor, Aegis, Gift of the Ancients, Luck of the Gambler, some of the heal IOs. It's still very easy to make money off of Performance Shifter IOs too.

But yeah, if you want to make money FAST, you need to market 20+ toons at once like some of us do, or you need to set up the PvP farm. ^_^

"But yeah, if you want to make money FAST, you need to market 20+ toons at once like some of us do, or you need to set up the PvP farm."

I made more than half a billion taking a character to level 35 on task forces and cashing in the hero merits at 30,32,33 and 35.

I don't even know if that counts as making money fast any more.

Well, we're working from a base standard of 200 million in 2 days, per the OP. ^_^

I can probably make 200 million in 2 days times 10-20 marketeers. They don't all make that much money every two days, but I make at least a couple of billion a week or more.

After a recent changing of what IOs I was targeting, I think I figured out I could get one character to mass 1 billion in a week. I haven't officially tried it, but I went from about 900ish million to about double that in a rather short time frame and it's what sparked the idea. This would be 100% via market, so no drops, tickets, etc...