So what's selling?

I've been away from the markets for a long time now, almost a year. I'm still sitting pretty on 1.5 billion influence, but as I want to SPEND it, I need to start making money again. It looks like a lot of my old niches (particularly the salvage ones) are no longer as profitable as they used to be. Back in the day I used to run AE missions for tickets and turn them into bronze recipes or common salvage depending on the day to make my money but the 200-400 million I'd pull per run has dried up. Salvage is cheaper as are a number of my old favorite bronze recipes. What are people selling now for profit? Or are the returns just much smaller than they used to be?

Well in the last year they've introduced the Signature Story arcs, which allows someone to get an extra A-Merit or two every week. Dunno if you were around for A-Merits, but basically one will let you get 5 gold rolls. Or, you can spend 2 and get any specific non purple recipe. They're kind of a deal breaker for the market.

Then there's also the Paragon market, which offers enhancement unslotters, (so you can swap enhancements between toons without respecing), and account-bound uncommon enhancements (Karma is a big hit there), all for real money (or rather the paragon points you buy with the real money...)

And there's ALSO the incarnate content, which you can buy recipes from by saving up astral/empyrean merit rewards.

So basically, there're many more ways to get the moderately sought-after items. Things like Purples and PvPIOs still reign supreme as far as bang per buck, but just about anything else only takes less than a week of playing. You can still find niches, but they won't be as profitable.

The SS/Fire Brutes have been farming up a storm in AE. That drove down most bronze and silver prices. Then I made up CEBR (check the Brute forums) which let unslotted lowbie Claws/Electric Brutes farm tickets as well as a moderately well slotted SS/Fire Brute. That drove down bronze and silver further, plus Rare Salvage. Then I made up a big spreadsheet and determined that the best things to roll were Bronze 15-19 followed by Silver 10-14, and posted my results in this forum. So basically anyone who wanted to do AE Ticket farming has been hitting those lowbie Bronze and Silver tables hard.

The Devs fought back with MARTy and eliminated XP for rezzing mobs in AE, but it has only reduced PLing in AE. Ticket farming was mostly unscathed. I21.5 reduces XP for ambush spawns, but that won't hurt SS/Fire farmers much. Expect Bronze and Silver prices to stay low. There are enough people doing it to keep prices down.

Salvage changes are due to I21, which prevents free accounts from getting Salvage or Recipes. But it seems to have increased (doubled?) Salvage drops for VIP accounts. I believe the new Paragon Rewards may have also increased the base Salvage capacity of VIPs, plus you can buy more capacity if you want. Since people can hold more they may not need to buy as much, and they have more to sell. And the Devs added new power sets, so lots of people have been playing their lowbies. As a result, there's a lot more low and mid level Salvage on the Market, and less demand. With Titan Weapons and Staff Fighting on the horizon, expect people to keep playing lowbies and listing their mounds of Salvage.

Purples and PvPs are still the rage. Take your SS/Fire blueside, get the Demon farm from Harvey Maylor, and pray for purples. That's my advice. Alternatively run the Signature arcs as Steele suggested. You can get 1 A-Merit a week, and an extra if you run the mission again once per character. The blueside arc can be very fast, maybe 10 minutes, so you can run 3 characters through twice each for 6 A-Merits in an hour. That's 3 LotGs per hour, as long as you have characters.