Zero to 100 Million in a Week

I was going to publish a Marketeering 101 guide with pictures, but then I thought that actually demonstrating how you can make money on a brand new character/account might be more entertaining and also informative, because anyone with 100 million can tell you how to make another 100 million, but how do you get there from nothing?

So I made a brand new character.  I went for a mace/shield scrapper, because I like scrappers and war mace is an awesome set.  I decided to name her Princess Knight because that's the best I could think of, and it was not taken:

Here I am in the newbie zone.  I've got my binds and channels all set.

I mostly posted this so people could make fun of my cluttered screen, I think.  :P

Team up with Dr. Girlfriend, woo!

I bought 8 hours of DXP from Pay 2 Win in the tutorial (she's next to the trainer, right before you enter the final fight zone).  I also picked up my Prestige Power attacks like Sands of Mu and Nemesis Staff, and I got my Inner Inspiration power.  These things are important!

Once I exited the tutorial I quickly joined a DFB group and set up which combat attributes I wanted to monitor (by right-clicking on them).  For now I want to monitor Current Hit Points, my 3 positional defenses, and my influence.  Not much to see just yet.

I teamed with a mobster mastermind, a fellow named H 3 0 ("the third 0 is for savings!"  He didn't explain what this meant) and an Asian fox or kitsune named Subject Amaterasu, who I decided had to have a Rocket/Stitch-like "created in a lab" bio.  I wasn't disappointed -- although really, it was hard to make sense of the full bio, but big points for having one in place by level 8, I certainly didn't.

But what has any of this to do with marketing?

Well, okay, let's get to the meat of this post.  I ran 3 DFB's and I did not get any rare salvage drops.  That's not lucky, but it lets me show you that even without good luck you can get started making money, which I did by using my Inner Inspiration power whenever I had the chance, and selling the medium and large inspirations, if I could:

As you can see I slowly built myself up to 100,000 influence over the course of maybe 2 hours.  If I saw something selling for 5,000 influence, I tried to list for at least 4,000.  If it was selling for just 100 or so I might drop it for 1 influence and take whatever I got, but I mostly tried to sell the endurance and health and defense ones that seem to sell best.

After 3 DFB's I was level 14.  I caught a portal to Ouro, went and got the badge for myself, then returned and headed to the Rikti War Zone, where I like to do all my crafting because there's a base portal and a merit vendor and crafting tables and anything else you could need, right there.

Oh, but I forgot to mention, I also cruised around Atlas Park and then King's Row to grab all the explore badges.  This gave me 10 reward merits, enough to buy 30 converters.  Now I was ready to rock and roll.

I had actually picked up a recipe during my DFB runs -- a Serendipity (defense) recipe, level 15.  Nice!  I can start right here!  I crafted it and converted it (defense to defense conversion), hoping to get something good:

Level 15 is too low for me to get a Luck of the Gambler, but hey, Kismet!  This will work!

As you can see it took several in-set conversions to get the Kismet:  Accuracy that I wanted.  But I still have 16 converters left.

Now at this point I had a dilemma:  Kismet:  Accuracy was selling for as much as 5 million, but I didn't have nearly enough money to list it for anywhere close to that price.  If I listed it too low, I ran the risk of it insta-selling for much less than I wanted from the sale.  This is a valuable IO, I don't want to waste this opportunity to have 4-5 million from a single sale.

The solution?  Sell something else first!

It's normal that your first sale has to go at whatever the buy-it-now price is, just so you have enough money to work with.  So I set my search levels for level 31/31, and I bought a Quickfoot:  Endurance recipe for 1,000 influence.  This is one of those recipes that only has two options, one uncommon (Quickfoot) and one rare (Celerity).  At level 31 my crafting costs were about 48,000 plus 3,000 for the salvage, and I had 82,000 influence to work with.

I was prepared to do up to several random rare conversions after this but on the first try I got the stealth part of the set.  Perfect!  I know that will sell, hopefully for at least a million.  I placed it for 500 influence (although I could have just done 1 influence, no difference really).

And it sold for 1.5 million instantly.  Now we're in business!

And here's where I sit at the end of my first session -- 1.1 million influence, and an IO listed for 4.1 million that hopefully will sell, and maybe for as much as 5 million.  In fact it may have already sold while I made this post.

I'm predicting I can hit 100 million by Friday or Saturday, but a full week would be by next Tuesday morning.  We'll see how I do.

Great start!  You'll get there in no time.

I like to see other people's strategies.  Every time I start a new toon I go through Outbreak, level to 2, kill one Hellion for the posting fee, and sell my two large inspirations.  That gets me the seed money to start flipping to get my first 5-10mm.  That might take a half hour, or overnight, but it's generally always there!

This is wonderfully done and shall follow your adventures.

I have no doubt you will be at 100 million on Friday.

I'm pretty sure I could be too if I stop Respecing my brute with fancy sets just to see how it works.

Happy hunting and good luck.

Following this. Also another tip for the first 100k to a million inf I used on my first character on Homecoming: buy SOs from the WW. People seem to list them for very low amounts of inf so I could get a couple of dozen lvl 50-53 SOs for ~500-1000 inf each and sell them to vendors for 10k+ to get a few hundred thousand to kick off crafting.

Following this. Also another tip for the first 100k to a million inf I used on my first character on Homecoming: buy SOs from the WW. People seem to list them for very low amounts of inf so I could get a couple of dozen lvl 50-53 SOs for ~500-1000 inf each and sell them to vendors for 10k+ to get a few hundred thousand to kick off crafting.

Yes, this is a tactic I used several times on Live, but I hadn't tried it yet here.  8)

Early morning update before work:  my IO finally sold (it hadn't when I went to bed).  I've also bought 30 recipes so I can start crafting and converting in earnest, but for now I'm limited by the fact that I haven't earned more merits for converters (although I probably could buy from the market by now if I wanted to).

In any case I crafted two of my recipes and, after a few conversions, I have another stealth IO and a Kinetic Combat IO to sell.  Tonight I'll have to join a Posi TF or do something else to earn more merits.

 

Early morning update before work:  my IO finally sold (it hadn't when I went to bed).  I've also bought 30 recipes so I can start crafting and converting in earnest, but for now I'm limited by the fact that I haven't earned more merits for converters (although I probably could buy from the market by now if I wanted to).

 

In any case I crafted two of my recipes and, after a few conversions, I have another stealth IO and a Kinetic Combat IO to sell.  Tonight I'll have to join a Posi TF or do something else to earn more merits.

This is what I'm trying to get my head around with respect to the market for enhancement converters.  Let's say for the sake of argument that they trade at 100,000 each.  I understand that many/most people feel that they are the most efficient way to convert merits into influence, so each merit translates to three enhancement converters to 300,000 inf.

At the same time, I can spend 1mm influence to buy a merit, or to buy ten enhancement converters in the market.

I call this "The Curious Case of Enhancement Converters."  I totally get the bid/offer spread, but frankly I have a hard time with the idea of converting merits into enhancement converters.  It seems like a real waste of merits, but at the same time I may have nothing better to spend merits on.  I know that if I want ten enhancement converters, I can raise 1mm in the AH a lot faster than I can earn 3-4 merits.

So I believe that enhancement converters are both wildly underpriced and wildly overpriced at the same time.  I know I will always be willing to buy them, and I know that hundreds/thousands of people will be willing to sell them.  I expect that sellers will gradually outnumber buyers, but who knows.

I do know, however, that I refuse to flip them.  I haven't observed a bid enough gap in bid/offer, and the dynamics certainly feel that sellers are more motivated than buyers.

my two inf

I don't usually think about it too hard.  My rule of thumb is that I can earn as much as 40-60 merits in an hour.  Say, a Manticore speed run is about 40 minutes or so, and that's 40 merits.  Or I can run the Freakshow Wars story arc from Ouroboros in about an hour, and that's 55 merits.  Last night we did a Moonfire/Hess combo in maybe an hour total, according to Paragonwiki that's 32 + 19 = 51 merits.  50 merits buys 150 converters.

(Or I can do a hami zerg raid in maybe 10 minutes total time and earn 80 merits.  Just sayin'.)

I do kind of balance in my head that 1 converter costs about 100,000 influence on the market, so if it takes me 10 converters to get the IO I want, that's about 1 million spent and I need to make more than that to turn a profit.  But usually the IOs that I spend a lot of converters to get to sell for very good money.  I may spend a lot of converters to get from a random IO to a Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge IO, but that sells for 6-7 million influence so I'd have to burn a LOT of converters to fail to make money on that sale.

Another thing to consider is that if you buy super packs, you'll eventually get a lot of merits as rewards.  If as you say 1 merit = 1 million influence, then you can buy a super pack for 10 million influence and wind up with 25 million, 50 million, 75 million, even 100 million in merits from it.  Of course it's not really as simple as that, I know you can buy a merit for 1 million but I don't usually consider 1 merit = 1 million influence, I think saying 1 merit = 300,000 (what you can get for it on the market by translating to converters) makes more sense.  Also I can go through 10 super packs without getting any merits, so there's that.  But it's just one more thing to consider.

For my purposes, 2 converters will usually turn a cheap uncommon IO into a rare IO.  200,000 influence.  If I pick the right IO, then that's a guaranteed conversion, but sometimes I work with IOs that take several tries to get to the rare IO I want (usually I do this because I can hit on something cool like Kinetic Combat as an example part of the time, and sell those without any more converting).

1-3 converters will usually turn a random rare IO into a rare IO that I know will sell for at least 2 million.

If I happen to come across a Miracle or a defensive IO, I'll spend more converters to get to the special one I want.  Otherwise, whatever turns up that I can sell, I sell.  I try to get to something worth selling in as few converters as possible, but then if I'm halfway to something really good, it's worth spending more converters to get to that Miracle +recovery or whatever it is.  ^_^

Hey, thanks for posting this!

Quick question:  Did you choose the Quickfoot recipe to start crafting with because it was inexpensive, or was there another reason?

Hey, thanks for posting this!

 

Quick question:  Did you choose the Quickfoot recipe to start crafting with because it was inexpensive, or was there another reason?

Any uncommon recipe that has a rare counterpart works, especially if there are only the two recipes in a given level range.  Certain uncommon recipes, such as defense, resist damage, and heal, are going to be more expensive and probably out of my price range for just getting started.  Probably endurance as well.  Also there are a handful of uncommon recipes that still require a rare salvage to craft so you want to avoid those.  But good ones include run, leaping, fly, immobilize, fear, confuse, knockback, to hit debuff/buff, etc.

I failed to take a picture before claiming my money, but my Celerity: Stealth and my Kinetic Combat sold while I was at work today.

I had five converters to my name.  I managed to get two more Stealth IOs out of that, and I put them up for sale.  Now to go earn some merits!

My first stop was Skyway City.  I considered joining a Positron TF, or running the new arcs in King's Row (I thought I might still be low enough to do them) or one of the new arcs in Steel Canyon like Laura Lockheart, I think her name is?  But I decided the best use of my time was SSA1.1, the first chapter in the "Who Will Die?" signature story arc.

The contact is Theodin, outside the police headquarters.  I checked Paragonwiki and it doesn't list him as a Skyway contact on the Skyway City page despite him having been in the game at least a year before shutdown.  I don't know, maybe they didn't list the SSA contacts because free players couldn't interact with them?  Or it was just never updated.

Anyway, back in the day you could earn 1 hero merit a week running SSA story arcs.  I could run SSA 1.1 in 10 minutes, and a hero merit was worth 50 reward merits, or you could use them to buy very valuable recipes.  I had a chart showing me which characters to run on which day, so that I would always know who hadn't run for 7 days and was due to get the weekly reward.  Most days I ran 2-3 characters through this story arc chapter -- about 30-40 minutes of work, for 150 merits (equivalent).  It was one of the best ways to use your time in the game, and I wasn't really surprised that the SCORE people nerfed it, but 20 merits for 10 minutes of work is still really, really good.

I was going to compare how many merits I could earn from the Laura Lockheart arc, or the one in King's Row, but then I remembered the one in KR is too new to be listed on Paragonwiki.  Even with Laura Lockheart, the wiki doesn't list the merits for running it because the article isn't complete.

Regardless, I don't think anything else was going to net me 20 merits inside 10 minutes.

I hit level 15 doing this, too.  Bonus!  Then I set out to grab the explore badges in Skyway, followed by those in Perez Park, Steel Canyon, The Hollows, Echo of Galaxy City, and Echo of Atlas Park.  I had to pause to update my Vidiotmaps at one point.

All of this netted me another 30 reward merits, so I had 50 merits.  I also hit level 16!  The experience from explore badges is not to be sniffed at when you're low level, especially if you have DXP going.

I headed to the Rikti War Zone.

I bought 150 converters, spending all my merits.  Why mess around?  I want to earn some cash!

One of my two stealth IOs had sold.  That's cool.

Step one -- craft those other 20 recipes I bought.  We need to start doing some serious converting!

I now have 26 Quickfoot IOs, and 152 converters to play with.

Step two -- convert everything to the rare IO, Celerity.  I got 11 Stealth IOs doing this.  (You can ignore the one pet IO -- that was a misclick!)  All of this cost 50+ merits.  I mean, I guess that should be obvious -- 26 conversions at 2 merits each, plus a couple more because of my mistake.

Although the stealth IO will sell for about 1.5 to 2 million, I'm not sure I want to dump 11 of them on the market.  Anyway, everything else gets random conversions!

I wanted to comment on some of my choices for what I want to sell or not sell.  Call of Sandman is one of those IOs that I will always convert again.  A lot of the controller-y type of IOs (sleep/immobilize/stun/debuffs etc.) are ones I don't bother trying to sell.  I'm sure most of them WILL sell, but not always for a lot, and not in the kind of volume that makes me want to place a lot of them on the market.

Usually I like to sell damage IOs but Devastation is one set that sells pretty poorly, so I convert those again too.  Decimation, on the other hand, sells well, but I don't think the proc is that popular so I usually convert these in-set to one of the other options, like this accuracy/damage.

I got a Numina regen/recovery and a Peformance Shifter +end by random conversions, so those were lucky.  I also got another Performance shifter that I did an in-set conversion on, and got the End mod version.  I particularly think this is a good set to do in-set conversions because both the end mod and the +endurance are better options, so you have a 2 in 5 chance of something better instead of the usual 1 in 5.  But the +end sells the best.

Here's something else I wanted to point out.  I got a Reactive Defenses Defense/Recharge IO.  This is a good set if you ask me, I use them a lot, but they'll never be as popular as Luck of the Gambler of course.  So as you can see, the most they're selling for is a bit over 2 million, and sometimes only about 1 million.

So I did a couple of Category:  Defense conversions on it and I got my Luck of the Gambler.

Now generally, I think the Defense and the Defense/Endurance IOs are worth money -- for almost any set, because the first things you're going to slot are the IOs that give you defense and reduce the endurance cost.  Any melee character who runs a lot of toggles wants to lower the endurance as well as raise the defensive values.  ^_^  So with Luck of the Gambler, I could convert until I get the +7.5% global recharge that everyone and their family wants to buy, but I can make pretty good money just selling the Defense and Defense/Endurance IOs.

So this was a good result.

I listed 21 IOs for sale, including five more of the stealth IOs (I already had one still for sale).  In the time it took me to write up this post, half of my stock sold.  Note that my Luck of the Gambler def/end sold for 4.8 million.  That was well worth converting from the Reactive Defenses IO.

So far so good!

This puts me at just about 39 million influence.  I decided to list the other 5 stealth IOs I had, so that's all 30 of the IOs I'd bought and crafted.  Time to buy more recipes to craft!  Also, it's Wednesday and I'm 40% of the way to my goal.  I probably should have set a harder goal.  :P

Great thread!

You're gonna blow this out of the water!

The only speed bump you might run into is waiting for buyers to come in.  One thing I've noticed about the enhancement market is that there are very few "low and patient" bids.  People are rolling in inf and want to buy when they want to buy, and as a seller you have no control over that.

Early morning sales, before I head to work.

I'm at almost 64 million and I've also bought a bunch more recipes -- the bids all filled overnight.  This time I picked knockback and immobilize, just to be different.

I crafted 20 recipes but I only have 50 converters left, so I only did conversions on 10 of them.  I got one Sudden Accelleration:  Knockback to Knockdown out of this -- not a huge seller, but obviously that's what I'm hoping to get a couple of when converting knockback IOs.  It can go for 3 million.

I got a nice LotG: Defense IO,  that goes up for sale immediately.

I got two Miracles and I tried to convert one to the unique, but I ran out of converters.  In-set conversion is expensive, but in this case very much worth it, so I'll hold onto these  two IOs for now until I can convert them.

Some of the things that I failed to take pictures of (or maybe I did, then when I was cropping things I forgot they were important -- hey I was getting ready for work so I was in a hurry!) are:

1.  I had an Expedient Reinforcement IO that the last five sales showed as little as 1 million and only 1 sale over 2 million.  However!  There were only 8 for sale.  I listed for 2.1 million, because I can pretty much guarantee it will sell for more than it first appears, since there are so few for sale.

This is one of those things where you have to judge what people are willing to pay and not list too high.  Say I'm listing a Brute ATO, and there aren't any for sale at the moment.  Usually they might sell for 10 million or so, but with none for sale I can almost certainly get 15 million.  But if I get greedy and list for say, 18 million, or 20 million -- well, it might never sell.  I might see an occasional ATO sell for that much, but most people are not going to pay that price, they're going to wait until later, or buy a super pack, or figure out how to convert to what they want instead.

So... I listed my Expedient Reinforcement for 2.1 million, and I'm pretty certain someone will pay at least that much if they want it now.  It's not one of those IOs that are in high demand, but in this case mine may still be one of the lowest offers out there.

2.  I had an Obliteration, dam/recharge or acc/recharge I think, that was selling reliably for 3 to 4 million, but there were something like 160 for sale.  This is kind of the opposite problem -- they will probably always sell for 3-4 million, in part because other parts of the set sell for 5 million and you can't have 1 part of a set sell for 5 million and another part sell for only 1 million, because people will spot that loophole immediately.  But with so many for sale, I listed for only 3.1 million just to not overlist.  It would be really easy to list for 3.9 million and have it consistently sell for 4 million without your offer ever being the lowest listed.

(Also, tangentially -- in this case the big sellers for Obliteration are usually the "quad" (gives 4 bonuses) and the proc.  In olden days these were the rarest parts of the set, but converters have evened out what is rare and what is common within a set.  However, these are still the ones that are used the most.  If you're going to frankenslot, you'll probably use the triple and/or the quad.  If you're going to 4-slot Obliteration, or more likely 5-slot, you're not going to drop the triple or quad, you're most likely going to ignore the damage IO, or if you want the most damage, maybe the damage/recharge or the accuracy/recharge.  Or you might be doing a specialized build that requires extra procs so you only want the proc from the set.  Point is, some pieces will always be in more demand than others, and usually it's the procs or the pieces that provide 3 or 4 stat boosts.  ^_^  )

(Another tangent:  these rules seem a little different for Miracle.  I think the proportion of people slotting more than one piece of Miracle is very low, so your odds of selling a Miracle: Heal (never mind one of the other parts of the set) is proportionally lower.  Probably half those sales are people who want to convert to the +regen IO.)

3.  All of my stealth IOs sold for about 1.5 million.  I think in this case I listed them for 1.5 million, since they seem to sell for at least that much reliably.  However I noticed this morning that the last 5 sales showed at least 3 sales for 2 million, so maybe I could be listing these higher.  Or maybe I'm doing just fine because all of them sold in a reasonable amount of time, and I still made a profit.  ^_^  I have to admit, I'm a little gun-shy because these were selling for less a week or two ago, so I'm wary of listing for too much.  Listing for 1,500,010 influence probably would have worked though.

At this point with this character, I have:

1.  Run 3 DFB's

2.  Run an SSA 1.1 arc (took 10 minutes)

3.  Explored a bunch of zones.

So I think tonight for sure I want to join a Posi or Synapse.

FYI, as far as merits of the King's Row and Laura Lockhart arcs you mentioned earlier, I've been tracking the new merit rewards of all arcs as I do them, and they're not much.

Shauna Stockwell's Superadine Ring gives 6 merits

Eagle Eye's Lords of Death gives 6 merits

Laura Lockhart's Collateral Damage gives 4 merits.

Can't tell you how long they take as I tend to take my time and read everything, but I think SSA 1.1 still grants far more merits per minute than any of those.

I don't usually think about it too hard.  My rule of thumb is that I can earn as much as 40-60 merits in an hour.  Say, a Manticore speed run is about 40 minutes or so, and that's 40 merits.  Or I can run the Freakshow Wars story arc from Ouroboros in about an hour, and that's 55 merits.  Last night we did a Moonfire/Hess combo in maybe an hour total, according to Paragonwiki that's 32 + 19 = 51 merits.  50 merits buys 150 converters.

 

(Or I can do a hami zerg raid in maybe 10 minutes total time and earn 80 merits.  Just sayin'.)

 

I do kind of balance in my head that 1 converter costs about 100,000 influence on the market, so if it takes me 10 converters to get the IO I want, that's about 1 million spent and I need to make more than that to turn a profit.  But usually the IOs that I spend a lot of converters to get to sell for very good money.  I may spend a lot of converters to get from a random IO to a Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge IO, but that sells for 6-7 million influence so I'd have to burn a LOT of converters to fail to make money on that sale.

 

Another thing to consider is that if you buy super packs, you'll eventually get a lot of merits as rewards.  If as you say 1 merit = 1 million influence, then you can buy a super pack for 10 million influence and wind up with 25 million, 50 million, 75 million, even 100 million in merits from it.  Of course it's not really as simple as that, I know you can buy a merit for 1 million but I don't usually consider 1 merit = 1 million influence, I think saying 1 merit = 300,000 (what you can get for it on the market by translating to converters) makes more sense.  Also I can go through 10 super packs without getting any merits, so there's that.  But it's just one more thing to consider.

 

For my purposes, 2 converters will usually turn a cheap uncommon IO into a rare IO.  200,000 influence.  If I pick the right IO, then that's a guaranteed conversion, but sometimes I work with IOs that take several tries to get to the rare IO I want (usually I do this because I can hit on something cool like Kinetic Combat as an example part of the time, and sell those without any more converting).

 

1-3 converters will usually turn a random rare IO into a rare IO that I know will sell for at least 2 million.

 

If I happen to come across a Miracle or a defensive IO, I'll spend more converters to get to the special one I want.  Otherwise, whatever turns up that I can sell, I sell.  I try to get to something worth selling in as few converters as possible, but then if I'm halfway to something really good, it's worth spending more converters to get to that Miracle +recovery or whatever it is.  ^_^

This whole exercise looks fun, I might try this out and see how long it takes to go from 0-100 million.  Always interesting to see how people choose to marketeer.  I think I might be able to do it in a few hours if I can bootstrap effectively in the beginning. 

I've moved to flipping purples recently.  Its way slower inf per real time, but extremely fast inf per time spent marketeering.  It means I've kind of lost track of the more active market niches though,  I'll be interested to see if the niches I used to get the bankroll for purple flipping still work.

As for converters, it is nice to be able to make them with merits, but I was making 50-100 million inf per hour actively marketeering, and that chewed through a lot of converters.  I would have to be pulling 160-320 merits/hour to match the speed I was making inf, so I found it much more effective to purchase the converters as needed.  I'm not very good at speed running things, so the market remains far and away the fastest source of wealth for me.

 

 

This whole exercise looks fun, I might try this out and see how long it takes to go from 0-100 million.  Always interesting to see how people choose to marketeer.  I think I might be able to do it in a few hours if I can bootstrap effectively in the beginning. 

 

I've moved to flipping purples recently.  Its way slower inf per real time, but extremely fast inf per time spent marketeering.  It means I've kind of lost track of the more active market niches though,  I'll be interested to see if the niches I used to get the bankroll for purple flipping still work.

 

As for converters, it is nice to be able to make them with merits, but I was making 50-100 million inf per hour actively marketeering, and that chewed through a lot of converters.  I would have to be pulling 160-320 merits/hour to match the speed I was making inf, so I found it much more effective to purchase the converters as needed.  I'm not very good at speed running things, so the market remains far and away the fastest source of wealth for me.

If you are going for a speed run, there are three blocks to look out for.

1.  Building up initial capital from scratch.  I figure you need a few million to start, unless you spend merits for the converters.  This is where the 5 merits from Atlas exploration badges comes in handy.  You can certainly grab those merits and therefore 15 converters faster than you can build 1.5mm from zero.

2. Selling product quickly.  If you are in a high demand time, then you are probably all right, but anecdotally I don't see very many, if any, low patient bids.  If you offer your ToD triple at 5 inf to hit the outstanding bid, you very well may lose money on the trade.  I rarely hit bids, so this may be less of a problem than I think, but there aren't many quality bids and very little depth on the bid side.  So you need to rely on buyers coming to lift your cheap offer, which will affect how quickly you sell.

3. Acquiring supply.  This is probably not a big deal at all, but I thought I'd mention it for completion's sake.  It's relatively trivial to pick up yellow recipe fodder over time with good outstanding bids, but there may not be a lot of supply available waiting in the market at the exact time you are looking for it.  That is partly my fault.  Sorry.

Zero to 100 million in a week? Try zero to 250 million in 24 hours, that's what I did. :)

As noted in my conversion marketing guide, bootstrapping is very easy, and doesn't have to take as much effort as the OP put in.

Just tour Atlas for the badges, buy an Enhancement Booster, take Inner Inspiration from the P2W store, fire it off, sell the Inspirations, list the booster for 1 inf on Wentworth's, and you'll probably get over a million. (When I tried it, I got 1.33 million.) That's ample capital to go into the conversion business.

FYI, as far as merits of the King's Row and Laura Lockhart arcs you mentioned earlier, I've been tracking the new merit rewards of all arcs as I do them, and they're not much.

 

Shauna Stockwell's Superadine Ring gives 6 merits

Eagle Eye's Lords of Death gives 6 merits

Laura Lockhart's Collateral Damage gives 4 merits.

 

Can't tell you how long they take as I tend to take my time and read everything, but I think SSA 1.1 still grants far more merits per minute than any of those.

I knew the'd be low, and I certainly wasn't thinking of running them because they were fast merits or anything, but because the stories are interesting.  But 4-6 merits for something that might take me 30 minutes to an hour to complete is really low.

Zero to 100 million in a week? Try zero to 250 million in 24 hours, that's what I did.

But documenting it step-by-step is helpful for some people, or at least entertaining to read (I hope!)  ;)

Tonight felt like a low-key evening for this project, even though I played on my project character much of the evening.  But not a lot of marketing going on at the moment.

I had several sales to collect at the start of the evening ,which got me to about 74 million influence.

But I had no merits and I couldn't find a Posi TF to join.  I was in the mood to do something different too, so I spent part of my evening creating a new character and running them through AE with my other account farmer.  Then I set that aside and was going to play on Princess Knight, but a hami raid was forming and that's very good merits so I swapped and joined that.

We did hami in the hive and then hami in the abyss.  That's 120 merits (I pick the merit reward both times, typically.  I like merits!)  I do these runs on my level 50 blaster Vanellope, because I have few level 50s and most of the others don't seem suited for a hami raid (one elec/shield scrapper, and three fire brute farmers).  However last night one of my other characters hit 50 on an ITF, my night widow Nabiki.  So when I saw yet another hami raid forming, I decided to swap to Nabiki, and I did a third hami raid.

They ran another one right after that but I'd had enough hami for one evening.  In fact they were running hami raids all night.  Seems like we're reaching the point where hami is the new MSR, although you have to be higher level to run it and you can't really run over and over on the same character because the rewards drop off.  But you can do at least 3 or 4 runs on one character, merits twice and then the other two rewards once each, I'm sure some people are doing that.

Finally I switched to Princess Knight, but I still had trouble finding a TF to join, so I did in fact run Laura Lockheart's arc.  That netted me only 4 merits but it was fun.  I also gained 2 levels to 18, and determined that my endurance usage was terrible.  Up to this point I've only been running with the vet proc IOs that you can get from Pay 2 Win slotted in my first two attacks.  (I forgot to post about this -- I discovered that I could buy unlimited numbers of these five IOs for zero influence, and I thought, cool! And I bought a bunch of them.  But you can only slot one of each and you can't sell the extras, you have to delete them one by one.  So that was a waste of my time, lol.)

At least I got a citizen shout out from that arc, lol.  ^_^

Because of my endurance issues I took the time to craft a bunch of level 20 generic IOs and slot my character out.  It performed much better after that, so I think that was a good decision.

After that  I decided to collect explore badges, but I only got the first few in Talos before I finally saw a Posi 1 forming.  I joined that and we did Posi 1 & 2, for 11 and 15 merits.  So I ended the evening with 30 merits, and I gained multiple levels... all the way to 24.

I got a few low level recipes from the Posi TFs, so I crafted those.  I converted my two Miracles to the specials, and the lowbie recipes netted me a Kismet: Accuracy, two Impervious Skin: Status Resistance & +regen IOs, and a Deflate Ego IO that as it turns out doesn't sell for anything, so I pulled it down and converted it again.  I got a Kismet from that, but not the Accuracy one and I'm out of converters again.

Aside from that I had an assortment of random IOs from my knockback IO conversions, as you can see.  At least I have a few things for sale again.

I may need to purchase some converters I think.

In fact, I decided to bid on 140 converters at 95,000 influence each -- about 14 million influence invested.  But it paid off almost immediately.

For one thing, in the time I'd taken to type this post I'd made about 15 million in new sales.

For another thing, I bought a bunch of these converters right away.  This allowed me to in-set convert my Kismet to a Kismet:  Accuracy, and a Miracle I had to a Miracle: +recovery.  (No pictures of those, I listed them before thinking of it.)  Then I converted the rest of the IOs I had (I'd crafted 20 recipes last night if you remember) and I had more stuff to sell, including yet another Miracle: +recovery and a Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharge which I got by random conversion.  ^_^

I decided this would be fun, so I did it!

I made a sonic/sonic defender, and bootstrapped them to ~6 million off a steadfast prot:knockdown IO into a LotG +7.5% recharge enhancement in about half an hour after getting my starting merits.  I did about and hour and a half of DFB while I waited for a few orders to fill, then began manufacturing LotG +7.5% recharge enhancers from level 41 Reactive Defenses recipes, and Steadfast Protection +3% defense from level 10 Impervious Skin recipes.  LotG was listed for 6,000,250 and Steadfast Prot was listed for 4,000,250.  I continued doing this for an hour and twenty minutes, alternating back and forth.  I mixed in a few purchases of already crafted IOs, and screwed up a section where I accidentally bought attuned versions instead of level 10, making it costly to convert to high value resist sets.  At the end of the hour and 20 minutes, I took a shower and got ready for bed to let the queue of things finish selling, and when I came back I had a total of 168,504,112 inf.

I took screenshots, but I need to figure out how to upload them in some way here.  It is getting late, so I'll do that tomorrow.

As several have pointed out, there's nothing very difficult to what I'm doing and it can be done much faster if you know what you're doing.  The biggest hurdle is how do you  get to your first million or two, and how do you turn that into five or ten million.  Beyond that you have everything you need to turn 10 million into 100, 200, 300 million -- however much you want, depending on how much work you put into it.

My overnight sales put me over 100 million.  I actually collected two sales before remembering to take a picture.

Of course, I still have 40 recipes that I'd bought so I crafted 20 of them.  I had 105 converters I think left from those that I'd bought at 95,000 each.  I've already made back the 14 million I spent to do that, obviously.  8)

Just some examples of what I turned 20 immobilize IOs into.  I got a LotG: Defense IO straight from random conversion, and I got another LotG IO that took several conversions to hit on a def/end that would sell well.  I did one conversion on a Performance Shifter and got the best result.  But basically, 20 IOs that I know will sell for at least a little bit.

For the life of me I can't figure out why sometimes I try to take a picture, I hit the button multiple times to be sure, and when I check afterwards I don't have any of those shots.  So I had an Aegis IO that only had 2 for sale.  I listed it for over 7 million, and wanted to show that and why I thought I could get that kind of money, because some had sold for 8 million and one for 10 million I think.

Oh well, I still had over 100 million after listing, and 24 things for sale:

There's a lot of value-added here, and thank you for doing this.  This is a great hands on guide on how to be involved in all aspects of the marketplace.

Well first of all, you can afford whatever build you want to afford.

Let's say a baseline build does not include any purples or Winter O's, or even ATO's or PvP IOs.  100 million is more than enough to purchase your build.  If you slot a lot of the more expensive things like Luck of the Gambler, and if you're an impatient buyer who wants everything NAO, you can probably spend more than 100 million.  We're going to assume you either are a bit more patient (since you've learned to work the market) or, alternatively, you earned enough money that you don't have to be patient anymore if you don't want to be.

I'm still patient, so I don't buy Luck of the Gambler as a rule, I put in cheap overnight bids on other defensive IOs and use converters to get what I want.  I'm cheap.  :P

Okay, so let's say you want to include a few PvP IOs and two ATO sets into your build.  The most expensive PvP IOs (the ones that you want, obviously, like that Pancea special) sell for around 8 to 10 million each.  That's affordable, or you can buy some cheaper PvP IO and convert your way to what you want.  ATOs also sell for about 8-10 million typically.  You can try to lowball bid to get them cheaper, or you can just buy 12 hero & Villain packs for 120 million and assume you'll get at least 12 ATOs to convert into what you want.  Either way, you're looking at maybe 120 million or so for two full sets of ATOs, 12 total.

If you want to add Purple recipes or Winter O's to your build, that's where things get more expensive, so you'll have to spend more time making money.  Winter Packs cost 25 million a piece, and on average you'll  get slightly more than 1 Winter O per pack.  I have a farmer who has all five Winter O sets slotted, and 3 purple sets slotted at 5 pieces each for the recharge bonuses.  That is, conservatively, 30 Winter O's at say 25 million each = 720 million influence, and I don't normally buy purples off the market, I wait for drops to come to me to finish my build, but you can say 15 purple IOs is another 150 to 300 million, I'd guess.  So you can easily spend a billion on a build if you really want to.  Making that kind of money just takes more time.

It's a very nice build too.  :D  I have similar builds on my 50 blaster and my 50 scrapper.  But I can't afford a build like that for everyone -- just yet anyway.

As several have pointed out, by working a specific niche you can earn money much faster for less effort.  That's all fine and good.  But if 20 or 40 people all try to work the same niche, the cost of materials to supply the niche (Impervious Skin IOs/recipes to work hastened's Steadfast Protection niche, for example) will jump while the price of the resulting IO will plummet.  At least, in theory that can happen.  :o

My method is not really focused on any particular niche.  I can use any uncommon recipes/IOs to do what I'm doing, and I get a wide variety of rare IOs to sell from it.  About half of what I sell only sells for 1-3 million but I still make a profit, and I like to think I'm keeping the market supplied with things a lot of people are ignoring.  It would take a lot of people copying what I do to drive prices up on all uncommon recipes across the board, and to drive prices on IOs down.  We already had that kind of situation just a few weeks ago, but at the moment things seem to have swung back in the favor of the seller, and I'm seeing things sell for over 2 million that were barely selling for a million just a couple of weeks ago.

So basically, this kind of method is fairly crash-proof, because I'm working most of the market, not just one niche.  You also learn more about the market, like the fact that certain Aegis IOs are in short supply at the moment.  >.>

Also, although I didn't specifically point this out, I've kind of demonstrated how to make money off regular recipe drops that you get through regular play.  It's perfectly fine for people to just play normally and make a little money on the side from crafting/converting and selling whatever recipes they get.  ^_^

I think I'll keep posting progress on this thread until next Tuesday to see what I really accomplished in a week, but I've already made all the points I wanted to make.  8)  Which is, anyone can afford a good build in this game.  But I can appreciate not everyone wants to mess with the market, so there are other ways to get what you want too, and that's good.

I do think that I need to include a little bit more on how I price things, maybe.  Last 5 is a way to see how the IO is selling, but it can be very misleading.  I also pay attention to how many are for sale, to gauge whether to list a lot lower than the apparent sell price, or to list high (such as the Aegis case I mentioned, with only 2 for sale at the time).

I don't pay much attention to how many people are bidding.  50 bids can mean the IO is in high demand, or it can mean one guy placed five 100-influence bids for stacks of 10.  :P

Sometimes you have to click the listing box multiple times to get the last five history to show.  It can be very annoying.  Occasionally I'll just list something for what I think is the going price, based on what I can remember.

One trick I've learned is if you go bid on something for 1 influence and then click on the find button on your bid, it will pop up that specific item and often that pulls in the last five sale info.

Also, sometimes the last five listing is seriously bugged.  If you see a popular IO selling for weird amounts like 1,000 influence, that's probably just a weird display error.

This is a beautiful thread, it brought tears to my eyes. +1 for each of your posts in here Shinobu.

Of course, if you don't bid but use converters to get what you want, you'll be spending extra to Attune it. But then, if you'd rather Boost instead, I suppose that's fine. I like being fully exemplarable, though.