The fastest/safest way of earning money that I'm aware of is just playing the market. Buy low/sell high, craft what's worth crafting, know who and how you can barter, and so on.
It's not "the fastest" or "perfectly safe", but it has the best combination of the two for me, and personally I enjoy it since it has that human element to it which makes it less tedious and repetitive than questing/fishing/killing mobs/etc. I am not an expert at marketing and I'm rarely the richest in my clan, but I am usually referred to as "the guy who enjoys that kinda stuff", and I usually gravitate towards trading in the mmo's I've played.
I am writing this primarily aimed for people who are interested in trying to earn some cash through the market, but feel it's daunting and aren't sure where to start. Some or a lot of it will be obvious, but I wanted to cover a few of the issues which I feel are frequently being overlooked. This is not a "how to make 5 mill into 500 mill in one week" tutorial (sadly), and not even a "how to make tons of cash really fast with no effort", but rather a collection of techniques and mentalities which I feel are helpful in making adena with a more relaxed playstyle.
Starting out, what you "need":
You need money to earn money.
Even if you have 100 mill "worth of stuff" you're trying to sell, you won't be able to earn any more until you can liquify some of it. If you have a valuable item sitting in your warehouse which you don't need any time soon, it might be worth selling it off and rebuy it when you need it in order to get that extra buying power. I sometimes do this even if I rebuy it at a loss, since the extra cash allowed me to earn more in the meantime.
Other than that, the only thing it really requires is a bit of time and dedication, and the biggest downside is that you're not earning xp while you're in town. Having 2 (or more) accounts is a big plus, since you can permanently have one account in shopmode to sell that big item or buy those last few materials you need to finish a craft, as well as buying and selling at the same time, and obviously the added shop slots. Personally I do fine with 1 account, but with a secondary I reactivate occasionally only when I need it.
Extra shop slots through fishing upgrades are helpful, but it really depends on your situation if or how you should get them. Time is money, and personally I found that it was economically sound to outright buy the fishing proofs instead of fishing for them myself due to the time it would take.
Interacting with other people:
You are trading with real people and not computer game characters. You will build a reputation, and just because it's not illegal doesn't mean people won't dislike you for it. If you buy an item from a legit player where he forgot to put in that last zero in it's price, or were selling an armor set for 1+1+1+1+50m adena but forgot to tick the "packet sale" box, you have a choice to be the good guy or the bad guy, or somewhere inbetween. He can't do anything about it if you laugh in his face and walk away, but be absolutely sure that his entire clan, ally, and network of friends will hear about you. Just how he can't report you for taking advantage of him, you can't report his alliance for training mobs on you the following 6 months whenever they find you xp'ing.
Scamming is always controversial. I've never done it, I'm not going to reccommend it, and I will just say this. Scamming is not against the EULA and you won't get banned for it, but just because you can get away with it does not mean you are not hurting other players. It's up to you if you feel it's worth destroying other people's enjoyment of the game - sometimes permanently - in favor of trying to get yourself some monopoly money.
Impatience and Lazyness are the two most profitable commodities.
People who sit in shopmode spamming WTS macros for 2 weeks are patient and not very likely to be willing to barter. People who are standing in the warehouse looking at the storage npc manually writing that one wts shout are often just wanting to get rid of it without having to do a shop, and can be very very flexible if you attempt to barter. If I see someone doing a wts shout for the first time, I usually /target them and see if they've started a shop. If they haven't, I pm them to ask how much they want and see how low I can get them. My two most profitable resales ever were both from instances like these.
If you start a conversation with someone wanting to trade and they give you a ridiculous initial offer, don't just say "no thanks" and walk away. For some people it's perfectly normal to start ridiculously high/low with the assumption that you will work it down/up. That's how bartering basically works.
One of the goofiest things I see when two people trade is "how much?", "offer", "give me a price first", "dunno", "ok 20 mil?", "lol no thx", "ok bye".
Similarly, if you are unhappy with a price someone is asking, don't buy it anyway just because it would make you feel bad turning him down. If he gets upset because of it, that's entirely his own fault. People are perfectly free to ask whatever price they want, as long as people are perfectly free to choose wether to buy it or not.
You do not have an X% chance to sell your item every time you press the WTS shout macro as if you were rolling a dice. Hitting it every second does not give you ten times bigger the chance of selling than if you were hitting it every 10 seconds. If nobody is wanting to buy the item you're selling, it won't make a difference how much you shout.
I'm not going to give a lecture on proper shouting etiquette, but I try to avoid a shout rate of "we-heard-you-already"-a-minute.
Figuring out what an item is worth and managing your cash:
Set goals for what you are saving cash for, and figure out what you "want" and what you "need".
I find it much easier to save if I'm saving for something specific. If I don't have any goals, I lose most of my drive to make a profit and I don't see much of a reason not to buy that hair accessory even though I'll probably only use it for 2 days before I stow it away on my storage alt. Do you "need" to make your weapon +4 in order to progress? Do you "need" a strider or a better augment before your next grade armor set and weapon?
Different items have different demands. Even if you could easily resell some +5 top B fists for a 10 mill profit to the very first person who were looking for some, the market for them is so narrow that it might take months for that person to ever come along. It's not profit per item you're after, but profit over time.
On the flipside, don't lose patience if an item doesn't sell right away. If a weapon sells in less than a few hours, you priced it too low.
Only after about a week of trying to sell a big item do I start thinking it's taking a while, and only after 2-3 weeks do I sometimes start trying to do something about it. If that.
Looking at other people's shops is helpful in figuring out how fast items sell at which prices. If I'm not sure how much an item is worth, I find someone else selling it and check their shops a couple times a day to see if it sells. If I was thinking it looked really cheap but was unsure, at least I had that confirmed when it sold fast.
An easy way to figure out a "hard cap" for an item's price is if people have it in both buy and sell shops. It's very unlikely that you will find people selling it for less than what the highest paying buy-shop is offering, and vice versa.
Don't lose perspective over adena. Augmenting, overenchanting junk items "just for fun" and novelty items do not become cheaper the more cash you have, it just takes more of it until you realise you've spent half your fortune on it.
Crafting and overenchanting:
All items are not automatically cheaper to craft than to buy.
In my case, you can buy a halberd for 20-25 mill or attempt a 60% craft for 22 mill. You can buy Maj Earring recs for 2 mill each and still make a profit if you fail 1 of 2. All items which can be bought from the npc are automatically pointless to craft, since the market price for crafting materials is up to 10 times more compared to their base price.
If you have any experience with spreadsheets, I strongly reccommend setting one up where you can quickly and easily see how much an item costs to craft.
Overenchanted items can be very difficult to determine the price of, there are just so many factors involved. Item market value, item crystal value, enchant scroll cost, how much a successful enchant increases the amount of crystals if the next enchant fails, success probability, and if the item has any additional benefits from being enchanted (+6 plated leather gloves are useless, +6 plated leather boots can net you at least 8 digits, if not 9).
That said, it should be obvious that not all items are worth overenchanting. Even if you succeed 4-5 OE's on certain items, nobody will pay even what it cost to make, let alone it's "statistical" price factoring in the failure probabilities.
You could write a small book on how to exactly determine the statistical value and market value of an overenchanted item, so I'll just leave it at saying it's something you get a feel of over time.
Do not attempt a 60-70% craft if you can't afford to fail it.
Do not attempt an overenchant if you can't afford to fail it.
There is no earlier savegame to load, and the GM's won't reimburse you no matter how unplayable the game becomes from being broke and having no weapon.
Impatience and Lazyness are the two most profitable commodities.
Those two characteristics are the only reason I make money. I scam no one. What I do is provide an item at, what I would consider a ridiculous price, and then sell out eventually because people haven't worked for that adena. If they did then no one would buy what I sell. Because of that I have NO compunction whatsoever for selling items at exorbitant prices.
As far as I am concerned I am doing the community a favor.
For some people it's perfectly normal to start ridiculously high/low with the assumption that you will work it down/up. That's how bartering basically works. One of the goofiest things I see when two people trade is "how much?", "offer", "give me a price first", "dunno", "ok 20 mil?", "lol no thx", "ok bye".
Some people get really ******. I've had people PM me for hours telling me how much of an [censored] I am and how my price is 5x-6x's what it should be. That's awesome. Someone else will buy it and I'm not the one coveting a material good that doesn't even exist in the real World.
There's no reason for anyone to get bent out of shape over a video game. Well, there's that and the fact that anger is not going to change my price. If people are cordial and want to deal then I am always willing to negotiate. Yelling at me over nickels and dimes while carrying a weapon with deep blue or red glow is just reinforces my notion that sheep exist for the sole purpose of being fleeced.
One of the goofiest things I see when two people trade is "how much?", "offer", "give me a price first", "dunno", "ok 20 mil?", "lol no thx", "ok bye".
Even better, this is what I get
Selling such in such
"How much"
Make an offer
"What do you want for it?"
20 mill
"lol no thanks I was thinking 10 mill"
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHGGHGHG
Good point :) I was selling some new shoes on ebay that sell for 70, and someone contacted me wanting them OMG RIGHT NOW. So I said ok I'll set the buy it now at 40, seemed reasonable. "Oh that's too high" they said.
So in other words they wanted them RIGHT NOW but at the starting bid. lol ><
Actually i did use to say make an offer too in the past, because i was thinking people that wanna buy my items know what they worth and make some reasonable offer.
But if people pm you they always want a discount they dont want to pay the price you asking for ( that could be a very fair one ).
So if i set up a shop and someone PMs i would go down a little but not to much.
I find it funny sometimes if i ask for 5 mil for a recipe and someone pms can you go down a bit and i say ok 4 mil they say nah 3 mil is max. Then i say nope 4 mil is fair you cant even get cheaper with coins if u need to buy em.
Ok for u 3,5 mil. they say.
LOL yeah 3 mil all they got.
If i stay on the shop sometimes they end up and buy for 5 mil because they want the item/recipe bad.
Some ppl even whine and say i need to make some money if you sell me a pakage i give u 30 mil for they stuff while i was askin 35 mil. Even when i agree next day i see the same person with 4 S weapons with sa for sale.
Yeah right he needs to make some money the poor guy.
Yeah you can tell me what u want playing the market is nothing else then taking advantage of someone or someones work.
If you try to underprice him to sell the item (you did nothing for it) later at a higher price ( maybe the same he was askin ) for a profit.
Sorry people like that i cant stand and i cant think what they do is ok. For me they not much different as scammers.
Basicly they rip ppl off.
Sure its not forbidden and its not their fault ppl fall for it.
BTW. If someone mispriced his items in store its his own fault.
Sure you can be nice and return it and say better watch next time but in general its his own fault that he did not check if the price is ok.
I would not say thats a scam if you buy that underpriced item. Why ? Because u didnt ask for it not did u do anything for it you just looked at his store and bought it.
I guess the next time he will check the price 3 times before he leaves comp.
If you wanna make money try work for it. Manor and spoil is a good way, crafting or selling shots too.
Playing the market is only rip of other ppl. But that my opinion.
theres a difference between simply barainging down to sell high later, and earning low to sell high, or FINDING low to sell high.
the example was given about Enria, so common in A Crafts. i COULD earn them for pennies to sell for thousands, or i could find someone selling for pennies and bump it up later, OR worse yet, buy ALL the enrias in town and sell them for 3x what i bought them for.
when there really isnt anyone selling for cheap, you do like you pointed out - find the guy selling the most qty, hope its not a botshop, and bargain it down.
the #1reason people start botshops instead of legit stores is to avoid the "bargainers" and Barterers. its X adena or nothing. i once tried to find out just how many people in Giran were bots, i found only a handful of people who would reply to PM's. the rest were shouting like mad and ignored or didnt see the PM i sent. and i spammed all the shops.
literally 1 hand worth of legit shops, people at the keys. the multitude were either not shouting and didnt reply, or were shouting with no shop up, or were shouting and ignoring PM's.
Whenever I go to buy something from people, I almost never go directly to the shopped sellers, I wait for someone shouting, or shouting myself. 9/10 times these people are much more leinent in their pricings, so if it normally goes for 5m, I can usually get it for 3.5-4m.
#1 Rule I've Found: NEVER BUY IT THEN JUST BECAUSE YOU NEED IT IN THE FUTURE, it's a game, you can wait 2 days to see if someone's gonna sell it for 30m instead of 35m, that 5m can be put towards other things, just because you waited 2 days. Too impatient? You have 7 char slots, make an alt.
Well if you constantly play the market , you basically learn who sells what. Like X rich guy sells IC set / Drag set etc , N guy sells 2 som with acumen. I always pm when some new shout appears. I made my best deal this way. I bought a som and a SB both +5 for 150mil total. Just the som was sold for 170. Impatient people is who I really love.
There is eomthing I should like to tell about the patience and keeping the same price for a week and more.
Recently a farmer was selling 20+ recipes of AOBA for 1kk each. This helped me to bargain the AOBA recipe I needed at almost half the price. At the same time the farmer is still siting there with just 1 recipe sold for many days.
So patience is not always good.
If your price is "fair" you just stick to it. If you overprice an item by mistake or intentionally you will probably end up with a wasted week or so ^^.
There is a very bad mistake the farmer did. Even if you have lets say hundreds of dragonic bow shafts you dont put all of them in the shop. You do it 13 per time. Thus creating the "illusion" to the buyer that is something hard to get. If someone sells 20 of the same item means it's probably easy enough to get it by yourself(in aoba case 1/450 spoil) so the potential buyer will skip the buying procedure and try to find out how not to waste that million.
The main weaknes of the OP post is you need time for sitting. Sitting and sitting and sitting and after that much more sitting. Everyone who plays the market has some favorite ways of doing it. And it often depends on what you need for the moment. And how much time you are going to spend on selling and buying. You must have at least 4 account to be able to play the market really effective. 2 accounts for active play and 2 account for sitting. If you have only 1 account playng the market is next to impossible. It sounds good to leave your dwarf to buy/sell when you sleep/work/go to school but... this is the time when there are few real players and this means few buyers/sellers. Even with my 2 accounts I still have a wh full of spellbooks which I simply have not enough time to sit and sell. And another wh full with uncomplete sets of key parts which need just a little sitting to buy the missing parts so the whole item can be manufactured... So non-stop sitting for weeks is a luxury most of us cannot afford. It is not needed to have a grade in psychology to find cheaper items which to sell at the fair price or even little more expensive. Which means (depending on the grade) 100-200k profit here, 500-600k profit there, later 1-2kk and 10-20kk or even more for the top items and for the highly overenchanted stuff. But this needs sitting and sitting and sitting. But most ppl want to play too. And if you want to play it means most of the time you have to sell quickly.
If the person had his/her mind already made up for how much they wanted why not just post it....
I just get so mad with people like that....
/Turns flame thrower on them :eek:
Oh, it's because of the undercutters...
Selling good item!
How much?
10 mil
No thanks
Ok bye
Then they put shop with the same item 9.5mil. The buyer always makes the first offer and they also come buy it it's not to the seller to deliver. Of course both can go to MRT (Monster Race Track) for trades since it's free teleport.
LS's jumped up in price when the Kamael came though. I get that. They've also plummeted now that the wave of C-grade and B-grade toons have moved up. Regardless, the dude is an idiot for pulling the same played out, and thoroughly pointless game of, "Name a price...LOL, no wai, lawl!".
A friend of mine wanted some low level LS's. I will buy them for him, but not from Scurvey.
Wow a trading thread! One of my favourite topics! :)
For a variety of reasons, I consider trading the single most profitable legit way of earning money for someone coming late to the game.
Raiding and hunting the end-game will probably reward you better, but this is not an option for newcomers. And because people usually sell their old stuff cheap, all the middle field items have such low sell value by now that you just cannot earn big money doing low level raids/farming. LvL 40 raiding for life crystals might be a notable exception, with all the transformations and so on, but one I personally have not got working yet.
Back to trading. The thought of considering "buy to resell" as something like scamming appears totally alien to me. After all, the trader is providing a service. The trader is taking over all the work of setting up shops – often over considerable time spans – plus the risk of not being able to sell with profit, or of not being able to sell at all. Even at good opportunities, all this service yields the trader not more than a 10-30% profit on the item sold.
So also do not make the mistake to consider a trader rich, just because he sells a SoM+4 this week and a soul crystal 13 the next – probably 80% of the crystal is the SoM that was sold the last week. Traders are not magically getting their stuff from nowhere, they have to search, and haggle, and have turnover to make a living. All of this is service done to the community, which wants to sell their spoils quickly and buy their supply and gear fast.
Same with consumables, which is actually the biggest fraction of trade that I do. If I buy sealstones and then sell GCP and BREZ near the gatekeeper for a 15% profit, I am doing this because people don't want to
- run twice a week to the merchant of mammon
- carry around 2k of (heavy) combat potions
- deplete their cash keeping a constant supply of dozens of BSOEs and BREZ
Useful tips for trading I can give are:
- Always pick the best location.
- Always offer the cheapest price at that location. Don't care much about other locations.
- Buy cheap, sell medium. You don't want to wait ages for a dummy willing to pay an insane price
- L2 WH prices are NOT medium. Prices that don't sell stick around longer, becoming overrepresented on that site. So find out the lowest price during the last 3 months and you are closer to a "good" price
- Stick to things that work. If you find out a buy-resell that worked, try to repeat it
- Never haggle emotionally. People might claim your price was insane, or demand insane prices on their turn – don't let it touch you. If you get too worked up haggling, don't do it. Usually people pay higher rates to an "impersonal" sell shop anyway
- Some people don't haggle. Accept it.
- If you haggle, and don't want to end in an hour of pokerface-standoff, follow this rule-of-thumb: Make steps that appear like a compromise, not like a haggle. Your trading partner is not a machine and will not fall for a strategy of "30M? 60M. ok 33M?"
- Cash is trading power. Don't spend it too quickly. Don't fall for "trade A for B" offers unless it seems a rip-off in your favour, cause even a rip-off means the other has what he wants, but you got another item you don't want and have to sell.
Ok and a final note on people making a typo in their sell shops:
Buy the item and then give it back.
It's their mistake, but it's your moral decision. The name of the buyer is displayed to the trader.
If you want to take advantage and play with adena you never worked for, you're as good as a thief. The trader will hate you, his friends will hate you. Besides, I didn't know one trader who didn't give a reward to someone returning a typo-deal to him. ;)