Zero to Awesome Redeux! 31 Day Project

Last August I did my "Zero to Awesome" 30 Day Project, in which I leveled a brand new character to 50 and fully outfitted her with a nice build and even gained a bunch of incarnate stuff within 30 days and based entirely on what that character was able earn on her own. Thread can be found here.

One of the complaints in that thread was that I benefited from being a 7 year vet. And this was true, but it didn't mean that anything I did was impossible for a brand new player. Anyway, the proof is in the pudding, and I like my little projects so I'm starting up another one. This time, I'm doing this on a brand new account.





This is my @Dark Shinobu account. I have several freebie accounts lying around, and this is one. It's not "brand new" since it has existed for several months, but I only have the one character on it (Twilight Maid, level 17 corruptor) and have never spent a single cent on the account.

I have, however, two copies of Going Rogue on hand that I bought for a few bucks each off of Amazon. Applying the code from one of these will give me one month as a VIP, with 400 points to spend. I applied one of those codes this morning. ^_^

The question is, what kind of character do I want to make? Last year's project was AE Baby, a fire/kin corruptor and my first level 50 corruptor ever. She is a very powerful character, the one I've used on some "Really Hard Way" Magersterium Trial runs. I have two more level 50 corruptors now, and several more that I'm working on -- I like corrs quite a bit, as it turns out.

I also have a ton of scrappers and brutes and defenders. I want to avoid Masterminds and Controllers, since this account will drop back to premium after a month (but I'll be able to spring for an invention license if/when I want to play the character). I want to avoid Veats/Heats for the same reason, and avoid any power choices that don't come for free so no Titan Weapon or Beam Rifle. I have a few blasters and tanks as well, neither AT appeals to me a great deal. But I only have one 50 stalker (street justice/ninjitsu, very fun to play) and one 50 dom (dark/dark, because it was new). My dark dom is fun enough, I can confuse any single target easily, but I generally don't feel she's the most power dom I could have built, whereas my street justice stalker is probably one of the best and most fun stalkers I could have built.

So... after some thought I decide to build one of the more popular dom combos... one of those that are supposed to be quite powerful. My choice is a plant/fire dom.

Next... a name and a costume. The temptation for plant is to do some sort of earth goddess/mother nature/dryad/naturalist kind of character, with lots of greens and browns. But one of the first things that pops into my head is "Lithium Flower" as in the song from Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I already know that name isn't available on Virtue, I'd already be using it if it was, and the more obvious alternatives such as "Lithium Rose" are also taken. But I do a quick Google search on the name Lithium to see if I can come up with something else I might like, and I run across "Dilithium" as in Star Trek's Dithium Crystals.

This gives me a kind of space opera angle on the character... I was already thinking cyberpunk since that's what Ghost in the Shell is and what the word lthium (as in lithium batteries) suggests. And so for my new plant dom, I present Dilithium Flower:



I spent some of my 400 points on a few newer costume options so I could look good. Blue skin because she's a space babe, and Cobalt Azurean likes blue people. I did settle on a brown/gold pattern to give a slightly more organic look to the costume, but then I added a blue plant path aura because, well, plants are blue on other worlds, y'know?






Did the tutorial. ^_^ Chose hero. I want to team whenever possible, and I did the villain thing with AE Baby (who has remained one of my few villain characters).

Step One: Just to not be obvious, I decide to run some of the introductory content rather than DFB my brains out (which anyone can do, and it doesn't prove very much). But first! I need my seed money!



A few kills, and I can afford to put my large heal inspiration up for sale at the auctionhouse, where it immediately sells for 150,000. I'm in business! Except I have only 2 market slots and 1 recipe slot. So... time to get down and dirty!



Look, I'm a girlfriend from hell!



For whatever reason on Virtue there was an Atlas Park, an Atlas park 2... and an Atlas park 24. Nobody knew why, but it seemed like the cool place to be so I spent my time there.

I ran into Zombie Slasher there, and he gave me an invite to my favorite global channel, so I don't have to feel all alone in the world with nobody to talk to. i joined TheMarket as well, and one of the global channels I'm in where they actually allowed me to be an Operator.



After an hour or so I've worked my way through the Mathew Habashy beginning arc and then half of the Twinshot arc, and I stop for a while to do other things on my "real" account (Manticore, Cathedral of Pain, Numina, then dinner).

Later I finish Twinshot's arc. By this point I'm level 7, and I think it's time for a DFB run (or two).

Two runs gets me the Damage and Accuracy bonuses and also takes me to level 12, where I have 11 market slots and 10 recipe slots. Finally it's time to market!



My opening market strategy is the same as always... buy recipes for cheap and sell them to a vendor. For my purposes I am picking uncommon level 50 recipes that are not popular -- Enfeebled Operation (immobilize), Essence of Curae (hold), Kinetic Crash (knockdown). Why uncommon/yellow? Because I can buy a lot of them instantly. They sell for 5,000 each, so a stack of 10 at 100 influence a piece costs me 1,000 influence and sells for 50,000 influence. Rare/orange recipes sell for twice that much, but it's hard to find any that will buy instantly. Still, if you look and see no outstanding bids, it's worth an attempt.



I do this in King's Row since there is a store very near Wentworth's that is a person just standing there, no need to open doors. But you could do this in Atlas or Steel if you like.



With about a half hour or so of work I'm up over a million dollars. Time to try and mutiply that! I put in a bid for some recipes that I can craft and sell for a good profit... but in the interest of not directly tipping people off on how to outbid me, I'll wait until next time to show what I've bid on.

Still working up a background story for this character, and I'll need to assemble a build in Mids so I know what I'm shooting for... but not bad for my first day.

::makes some popcorn and settles in for entertainment::

love this thread, love the other thread (which is going to provide my lunchtime reading tomorrow).


Viva Organica!

Your last thread encouraged me to start make my inf from WW and not AE, so im really looking forward to this one

GL and HF!!

*keeps an eye on the thread*

Tag.

:: Steals half of Eric's popcorn, and hands him a beer as apology ::

this is always fun... gl and ill be watching

What? You're not 50 YET? OMGWTFBBQN00B!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I'm not even 15 yet. :/

Day 2 - July 2, 2012

I did some marketing early in the morning. I'd bought a few rare (orange) recipes for 100 inf each overnight (Trap of the Hunter, Ghost Widow's Embrace). This netted me about 5 recipes to vendor for 50,000 influence. (But if I'd been smart I would have bought level 50 generic recipes that vendor for up to 100,000 influence each.) I also had bought two of the recipes that I plan to craft and sell. I bought up a bunch of Calibrated Accuracy snipe recipes, vendored those, and used the money to buy all the salvage needed to craft 10 generic Endurance IOs at both level 25 and level 30.

One thing I want to do is demonstrate all of the various ways you can make money on the market, so some crafting and selling of generic IOs is in order, and also a little flipping of salvage, and purchase of unwanted inspirations that I can combine into ones that sell well. Eventually I want to work up to flipping ATOs, which is what I do a lot of on my main accounts. The key to just about everything on the market is that stuff sells at low prices at times and high prices at other times, and the patient marketeer can buy low and sell high to the impatient. And when there are not a lot for sale, the chances of profit go up. And at some point you have the money to be impatient yourself. ^_^

But first things first.



When I got home, all of my salvage was bought, except the Inert Gas (I bid too low), and I had two Efficacy Adaptor: Endurance recipes. Someone had outbid me for a bunch of those. Ah well! Crafting the first two was going to be rough as it was -- 490,000 just to craft one of them, then more money to list it! Time to vendor some more!





I was having trouble finding recipes to buy cheap so I changed strategies, and look -- level 50 SOs are more profitable anyway. Why am I wasting time with recipes?





Soon I had my two Efficacy Adaptors crafted and up for sale, and was even able to start crafting level 25 and 30 generic Endurance IOs to sell.



In the meantime I joined some friends in stopping the clocks from building the Clockwork Paladin. No merits, but a badge that's not easy to come by.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday -- I picked up Seeds of Confusion at level 8. It's pretty rare to get such a set-defining power so early, but this is absolutely one of the bedrock powers of the Plant Dom. I expect the rest of the ride to be a lot of fun!



Another thing I did tonight -- I created a brand new Super Group. I kind of collect them anyway, lately, and had been thinking of maybe starting another. But the main reason is that not every new player can have full access to a functioning super group base, so why should I have that? On the other hand, anyone can start their own Super Group at level 10. I'm also interested to see how long it will take me to have a fully functioning base starting from scratch -- med bay, workroom with storage, all teleporters, energy and control to runn it all. You can buy it outright with influence, but I have to IO out my character first. I'm kind of thinking I can do it all in sixty days.

Also I plan to grab all the explore badges in all the zones, so why not earn beacon badges for a new SG while I'm at it? Thus was born Ala Coracina, which roughly translates to "Black Wing" or possibly "Raven-Black Wing". Possibly in Bad Latin, or even Pretend Latin.





Did I mention I have a lot of characters and Super Groups? No, don't ask why.

Anyway after all of this I finally got down to doing something to earn experience -- basically I joined another DFB run, although this was proceeded by a blind invite to a team (a full 8 person DFB team apparently) where everyone stood around for more than a minute, people asked if we were going to do anything, one person quit, another realized she'd been placed in charge and promptly gave the star back to the guy who'd formed the team, another person quit, and then I was placed in charge of the team. All without one word from the guy who'd formed it.

So I quit, and found another team. ^_^ Got to 14, almost 15, and sold a few things in the meantime:





Now we're talking! And I just wanted to share this as well:



The recipes bought at 55,000 are bought by me to craft and sell. These were all bought within 3 hours this evening, and you can see where someone had bought one for 52,000 previously (my overnight bid of 10 was at 51,000). The one bought for a million in between my purchases? THIS is why marketing works.

After a break I came back to find some more stuff had sold:



I was up for a Positron Task Force, and I happened to find one starting (which... honestly isn't that hard to find on Virtue). It was a good team but hardly anyone had anything to say. I went from 14 to 17, then we did Posi 2 and I made it to level 20 right as Dr. Vahz died.



That's shadow-me on the far left.



So that means I can run a Synapse or Yin TF now... or the Summer Event... or a DiB, if I wanted to. Or some of the newer content that starts in the 20's.



This guy had a pretty cool costume, I thought.



At the end of day 2 I'm level 20 and have about 20 million influence, with most of my market slots full of things for sale -- all generic endurance IOs mixed with a few Efficacy Adaptor IOs. I also now have the level 25/30 Endurance IO recipes memorized.

Not a bad start!

Good start indeed and yes Coracina is a genus of bird, Black Wing would translate into latin more like Wing of Black so would be more Ala Nigri but there are multiple words for both wing and black so its flexible.

I remember reading your previous project Organica, I look forward to this one as well.

Fantastic! I loved your previous 0-awesome project (re-reading it now) and this one looks like it will be at least as interesting again. Looking forward to seeing more

Good stuff!

I love Latin names and use them liberally, they sound so much better than english translation

Like Ignibus Caelis instead of Fires of Heaven

Interesting read, although I have a question.

What's stopping you from asking outloud for some start up cash? The marketing would go much faster and with much less effort if you started with even a small 5 million.

I understand some may find it cheating, but the CoH environment, particularly it's generousity, is part of the game. Not only that, but if a market like ours exist, so does the overly rich who are willing to give some pocket change. You can't have one without the other in our online culture.

I understand the experiment is more for fun and to prove that it's possible even in the worst circimstances, but I thought I'd mention that this is worse then the worst. For any of you who complained about their last project, they didn't take advantage of this in that one either, challenging themself more than anyone would have to in the beginning of the game.

Anyone at all can start up a character, on any side or any server or any time, ask for 5 million in Help/LFG and get startup cash. In any game where I'm trying to understand and learn the economy, I would always start with that.

What could take any of us days in a new game may take a higher level seconds to give an unnoticable amount.

Well basically, I could hand myself 500 million and be done with it, which is the sort of thing I normally do when I create a new character. But I want to demonstrate how easy it is to leverage the market to your advantage starting with nothing. If you can get help and skip some steps, all the better, but for those that maybe wouldn't feel comfortable asking for a handout, there are plenty of other ways to get started.

Anyway, buying some guy's level 50 IOs that he's dumped on the market and vendoring them really amounts to the same thing.

Day 3 - Tuesday July 3, 2012

I have -- let's see -- 2 VIP accounts, not counting my current third one; 3 Premium accounts (bought 1 each of the three times they've had VIP starter kits on sale, for like $1.99 or .99 cents. Two have been upgrade with GR as well); I have 3 freebie accounts, one of which is the one I just upgraded to VIP via a cheap GR box three days ago. 8 accounts all told.

I just mention that because, when they do a Freebie special like today, I have to log in all eight. I am compelled!




What we have here is a pic of some of what I bid on last night.



And what we have here is what I bought overnight. Note that my bid for Spell Scrolls at 12,000 each was too low to buy any, and while I picked up 2 large inspiration Escapes for just over 15,000 influence each, I'd placed a bid for 10. Someone else bid higher than me after I bought two.



At this point, though, I have enough money to buy salvage and craft the Performance Shifter end/rech recipes, and the Efficacy Adaptor endurance recipes. I have salvage for five more level 25 generic Endurance IOs (once I've rebid on the Spell Scrolls and waited a bit). Unlike my level 30's, the 25's are selling. I have two Immortal Recoveries to flip, and (after another purchase) I have 3 Escapes that I can combine into a Resurgence to sell.

What I don't have is enough slots to list everything at once.

Some of what I'm doing is just for demonstration purposes. I'm not making a lot of money crafting generic IOs, and because the level 30's aren't selling they're cluttering up my inventory slots. But crafting and selling generic IOs is a legitimate way to may a few million a day. Buying large inspirations that are cheap and converting them to one that sells well can be lucrative. Flipping things like Super inspirations can be quite lucrative. Just as another example, the Ultimate level-shift inspirations sometimes sell for a million a piece, and sometimes sell for multiple millions -- 15 million, 20 million, even more. People use them during Magesterium badge runs, especially the Really Hard Way badge runs, so when one's forming you can have a lot of people trying to buy these things really quickly, and the price goes up.

But my bread-and-butter methods of making money have always been crafting set IOs like the Performance Shifters and flipping ATOs.

I bought my Performance Shifter end/rech recipes for just over 2 million each. I bid slightly higher than the going rate, so I probably outbid some other marketer. But I only wanted the 4 to start with anyway.

I'd checked what the crafted versions were selling for -- up to 40 million, with only a handful for sale. But I wanted mine to sell quickly so I did not price them nearly that high.

It's important to remember that my normal marketing strategy is to price very high and wait days or a week for stuff to sell at the right price. I market with so many toons that I only visit them once a week maybe, so I don't care if five days go by before I get the price I want. But for this project, I want to sell fast, I don't want stuff clogging my marketing slots. So I list the first two Performance Shifters at 13.1 million and 15.1 million. Later after those have sold I list two more at 17.1 million. I possibly could list for much higher, there are only 11 for sale at the time I list them, but for all I know some marketeer is poised to list 20 more at a sub-20 million price. So I'm not too greedy.





By the end of the evening, I've sold most of the Performance Shifters (and the Efficacy Adaptors and level 25 Endurance generics too). My Resurgence that cost about 70,000 to make sold for 555,555, and the Immortal Recoveries that I bought for 500,500 each have sold for 3 and 5 million. That's how flipping works, right there. ^_^

I'm up to 94 million influence! But I plow much of it into overnight bids so that I can make more money tomorrow.

On the "IO my character" side, I'd crafted a level 20 Essence of Curae drop and a bunch of level 20 damage generics, and a few endurance reduction and endurance modification generics. Nothing more than that. My market slots are crowded so I'm not ready to fill them up with salvage bids for my own benefit just yet.

I run my level 20 costume mission. My new costume uses a few more pieces from the retro sci fi set, and now I've spent all of my 400 points that came with GR. I have 10 points left.

I start gathering explore badges -- Steel Canyon and Perez Park, and part of Skyway, when a friend advertises a Posi 1 forming. Well, I was hoping for Synapse or Yin, but experience and merits are still good. I end up running both Posi 1 and 2 again, this time with friends who are very good players and also fun to talk to during the TFs. I wind up at level 22, nearly 23. I guess tomorrow I'll worry about slotting more IOs.

This is really educational so far. I'm looking forward to more.

Day 4 - July 4, 2012





A lot of stuff sold overnight, including many of the level 30 generic Endurance IOs that were cluttering up my market slots. As I'd hoped, the 4th of July acted a bit like a weekend day, when more people are playing and buying IOs. It doesn't take much for these IOs to jump in price from 400,000 to 500,000, and suddenly the ones I listed at 401,000 each sell.

I only bought one Controller ATO and one recipe overnight, but that's okay, I need to IO my character so it's good to have open market slots right at the moment.





First though I check my bids, since I only bought 1 of each item I bid on. In both cases it doesn't look like anyone else is outbidding me, so it seems safe to leave everything alone. I only placed those bids just before going to bed after all.



One thing I do here is set the min and max level shown to 25 (top left corner). This is because I'm level 22 and want to craft level 25 generic IO recipes, so this makes it much easier to look at things. At times it helps to look at only what's for sale, etc. For example if there are no recipes for a given set IO for sale at any level, then you know they pretty much sell as soon as they're offered for sale, and are probably going to be expensive.

Don't forget to reset it later, or you'll confuse yourself wondering why no ATOs are listed anywhere.



Here we see that I can buy some of the recipes on the market for much cheaper than the crafting table sells them. I could probably do that for everything if I wanted to place bids and wait, but crafting IOs for my build is not making me any money, so I'd rather get the process over with.

Strangely enough, the ones that might seem obvious to buy -- hold, snare, for example -- are the ones that I'm unable to buy immediately, while things like heal, recharge, and accuracy that you'd certainly think are much more popular are easy to pick up instantly for 500 influence each. (The table charges something like 20,000 to 25,000 at this level.)

Having the recipes, or even just bids on the recipes, makes it easy for me to look at what salvage I need to craft. I'm doing all of this in Steel Canyon by the way, since the University (with crafting tables) is near the market. Redside I'd be doing this in Cap Au Diablo for the same reason.



I won't bore you with all the details of buying low level common salvage to craft level 25 generic IOs. Basically after an hour's work I am fully IO'd with level 25 IOs. I have a build that, frankly, I could keep all the way to level 50 if I wanted, just adding to it as I acquire new powers and slots.



In the meantime I've crafted my Performance Shifter and listed it for a considerable markup. There still aren't a lot for sale and some have sold today for 40 million, so I'm going for it! I am flipping the Controller ATO, I bought it for just over 12 million and hope to sell for 40 million or more. I list one at 36 million. I have no doubt they will sell, evenually, but I'm worried they might not sell soon. Still, at the moment I have open market slots so I can afford to price it high.

I also have a few extra level 25 IOs to list -- Endurance, Recharge, something else, I forget. I have two more holds but I plan to use those, they don't normally sell well anyway.

My next project is a little silly -- I run a friend's AE ticket farm. As a level 22 dom, I'm ill-equipped to run such a farm, but this is just for demonstration purposes. I only set it for 3 people, and I buy a bunch of purple inspirations, and I manage to survive through the opening fight and ambushes. This only nets me 86 tickets, but since I'm doing this for demonstration purposes only that should be enough.



Just because it's a farm mission doesn't mean you can't have plot and character!



Normally when I ticket farm I use a scrapper or brute who's softcapped defensively in some way, and I earn a great deal of tickets, but the basic idea is you can random roll for recipes with what you've earned. Some people will just buy rare salvage outright to sell, some people will random roll silver or gold ticket rolls, some will roll high level as opposed to low, but I just about always roll level 10-14 bronze rolls. There is a lot of junk to sort through, but the things worth keeping -- such as Regenerative Tissue +regen, Steadfast Protection +3 defense, Rectified Reticles, or Achille's Heel Chance for Resistance Debuff -- make it worth your while.

But I'm level 22 and I only get one roll. I wind up with a Regen Tissue end/heal, which is technically not junk, so I craft it and list it for sale.

After this I swap to another character to run a Manticore TF, and then I run three Summer Events on three different characters. I want to run as many of those as possible, and I've been preoccupied and only had run 1 since last Saturday. Happily just after the Manti I see someone broadcasting an Overwhelming Force KB to KD IO for sale, which I promptly buy for 50 million, and then on my runs later I earn another one. Even better, two of the three I've earned have been on my level 30 locked brute Shinobu Thirty, and the one I bought was from a level 30 character, so 3 of the 4 I own are usable at level 27. (Every other Overwhelming Force I've earned is level 50, right now.)





By the time I'm done I have sold my Performance Shifter for 33 million plus, and a bit later I'vd sold a bunch of the generics and have bought 3 more recipes, and another Controller ATO to sell.

Day 4 - Quick Addendum



Would you believe that in the time it took me to post the above, all three Controller ATOs that I'd listed sold for 40 million each?

I know flipping these things is easy, but that was faster than even I expected.



Halfway through day 4 and I'm at 131 million. (Though I'm about to reinvest it in new things I can craft or flip.) I also have the start of a bio, though it's a work in progress. ^_^

----

One other thing that amused me. On the Manti Task Force, I played my dark dom Ash Valentine, who still needed that for Task Force Commander. And... I know I said earlier in this thread that I had a dark/dark dom, but really, she's dark/fire, I just colored the fire black so as to look like darkness powers. It was so convincing that I forgot I was playing Firey Asault!

Anyway... most of Ash's fire attacks are the ranged ones, only have Incinerate as a melee attack. I'm not really sure if I skipped a really good power or not, I might have to check into that. On the other hand, I'm a perma-dom with tons of dark control powers and softcaped for smashing/lethal, so it's not all bad.