Yomo Kimyata

This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm normally a terrible hoarder, both in games and in real life. Fungibility changed that completely for me in Homecoming. Once I got over my fears of anyone trying to corner the salvage market, I sell it when I can and I buy it when I need it or will need it soon(tm). Sometimes I'll buy a few thousand of salvage if I think someone's trying to make a run (I was very suspicious of whoever was buying tens of thousands of yellow salvage at 860), but in general I'll take my chances. In general, I like to store my things in the AH. Not necessarily in MY AH slots. I'll get other people to hold them for me until I want to buy them! STORE YOUR STORES IN THE STORE.

To do otherwise is simply gauche.

I think it's unlikely, but I'd like to amass 100 bn in inf by Labor Day.

I have four major markets and a bunch of minor ones. I consider myself in control of one of them: about 200-500 trade a day and I am buying or selling 95%+ of the trades. It’s kind of a pain, since I need 120 slots free to keep bids and offers up. The rest of them I’m content with skimming the cream of 50-250 sales a day. Controlling the supply of a market is trivial. If you named an IO, someone could probably provide 100 in an hour and 1000 in a day and 10000 in three days. At most. Finding buyers for that 100, or 1000, or 10000 is my personal bugaboo. I’m just trying to bask in my imaginary currency while I can. I realized that I have until Labor Day to accrue my riches.

I'm sticking with a heart. I'm comfortable with my emotions.

This is true, but my fading eyes mean that I try to craft things under my level +3. I find it harder to read the numbers when they are red.

If you want to play the market, which I encourage, then choosing something like boosters or converters to trade for inf makes sense. Trade it, then use the inf to buy the item you want on the AH. For ease and simplicity, you are not going to fail if you use merits to buy enhancements, particularly winter os or purples, that you plan to use for yourself. Both merits and inf are easy to come by, so there’s no point in stressing out if you didn’t get to your end point the cheapest way possible.

I don't think I ever played stalkers on Live, but I'm enjoying them a lot here. I've got a staff/bio in the mid 20s, a stj/sr in the teens and a bs/sd in the teens. The staff is definitely my favorite. I'm a little disappointed in the stj -- damage is really lackluster in comparison to the other two, but I think it will mature as it levels.

Hmm. I haven’t tested it, but have noticed a few occasions where I could not convert attuned at all. Like trying to convert a Cloud Senses to a Siphon Insight, IIRC, gives you a failed conversion message. They both exist at lvl 30, so you can convert a lvl 30 one, but you cannot convert an attuned one.

True dat!

Fair enough! Not the easiest or fastest route, but as long as you get where you want to go, that's good!

There are (at least) three things I've noticed and I try to use to my advantage when selling: 1. People like round numbers. 2. Buyers generally don't like to bid creep, and will usually only place 2-3 bids. 3. People tend to believe the last five, and assume that the next buy/sale will be in context of that. None of this is rocket science, just a type of behavioral economics, but it may lead you to some conclusions.

And climbing Mt. Everest means just taking one step at a time. A toddler could master that in a couple of minutes. It sounds like to me, according to you, that the OP is going to need to rely on some sort of PvP in order to be 'challenged'.

If you have more than 50,000 left, I'll pay you 70k a pop for 'em!

You're kidding me, right? This is 'challenging,' or 'arousing competitive interest, thought, or action' because it is possible, yet extremely difficult, with a lot of strategy and planning. You can't just zerg. You can easily do it by street sweeping, but that would be tedious.

You want a challenge? Start a new alt and from the moment of creation change your settings to +4/x8. Level to 50 without teaming. The first 10 levels are brutal.

I believe that it was Shinobu who discovered that attuned enhancements convert at the minimum level of the set. So an attuned Serendipity, which runs from 15-40, will convert at level 15, which cannot convert into a LOTG (25-50). Level 25-40 will work though. Red Fortune and Reactive Defenses attuned will work as well.

I just noticed: 4757 bidding 73526 for sale

That's great that you controlled a market at all! There's a limited number of things to do in this fungible economy, and it's got to be rare to find something that no one else is meddling in. Hopefully your profits will return.

I always try to ask: where do they come from, and where do they go? Purple recipes come from random drops and merit exchanges. Whether or not people exchange merits for them, purples are always going to keep dropping for farmers forever. There will always be an increase in supply on a day-to-day basis. Purple recipes get crafted, become enhancements, and normally get permanently slotted in end game alts. In order for demand to increase for purples, one of two things need to happen. Either more people need to take their main to 50, or existing people need to take more alts to 50 and equip them with purples. I think we are seeing a secular trend towards "end game". I think most people who are going to build farming builds have already done so and use them as their main source of inf. I think most people who have a main at 50 tend to play that 50 for incarnate stuff rather than build out new 50s. So I think supply will continue to rise, while demand will stagnate over the long-term. If inf as a currency weren't so easy to come by, I would predict that would lead to lower prices in inf. However, it's possible we see inflation effects as people realize that inf really isn't good for anything, so heck, why not pay 20mm for a LOTG proc? My 2 inf.

This, of course, is completely true. This is exactly how you would expect someone to approach it if it were their real-life job and for real money. Despite it not being "optimal" behavior, however, I think that most people will do one of two things: 1. Convert in-set until you have what you want, or you run out of converters, or you run out of inf to buy more converters. 2. Don't mess with the in-set conversion process at all and be happy with what you got. I've started using a rule of thumb: if I think I can sell a particular piece of a set for more than 3mm more than the piece that I own, and if I can do this in bulk, I'll run the numbers. Otherwise, it's all yours.

First of all, you have to start with an uncommon recipe that is level 25 or higher. You will never get to LOTG proc with a level 24. Your odds are best with a level 41, but your crafting costs are higher. In theory, you can roll once by category and convert to rare (2 converters) and roll once by rarity (1 converter) and end up directly with a LOTG proc for a total cost of 3 converters. That would be pretty sweet. But this is extremely unlikely. In theory, you could roll literally forever, until the sun burns down into a cinder, and never end up with a LOTG proc. This is also extremely unlikely. The "right"answer is an exercise in probability and patience. It will depend a lot on what recipe you start with because that will impact how quickly you get a rare. There are plenty of IOs that will guarantee a rare on a single conversion; the running, leaping, flying, and teleporting ones "jump" to mind. I haven't worked out the exact odds, and I don't intend to. I think your numbers sound optimistic "on average", but not outrageously so. One problem here is that the average may be, for example, 5 conversions to change a random LOTG into the proc, but it has an infinitely long tail. If you had a million IOs, you would expect it to take about 5 million conversions to convert them all. But for ten IOs? It might take 50 times. It might take 5 times (EDIT: duh, no it might not take 5 times. It might take 10 times, though). But it might take a lot more. There's going to be variability with a smaller sample set. I leave it to someone with more patience than myself to test Ajax's theory. Take, say, 100 uncommon recipes, craft them, and document how many licks it takes to get to the center of conversions it takes to make them all into LOTG procs. It's probably even easier to work out the probabilities directly and model a Monte Carlo simulation, but I don't have the patience for that either. I suspect that it's not profitable over the long term. If it is, have at it!

(NOTE: This was originally going to be a part of a much more comprehensive guide on making inf via the Auction House (AH), but the more I wrote, the more it began to turn into a manifesto on trading, fungibility, converters, etc. I don’t have time to write all that, and you don’t have time to read all that. Consider this to be an abridged mini-guide that may eventually become part of a bigger whole.) There are two fundamental forces that fuel the process of extracting inf from the AH: 1. People like to buy things now. 2. People like to sell things now. It is not important why this is. It is irrelevant as to whether or not this is good, bad, rational, or irrational behavior. It simply is, and that’s enough. This guide is for anyone who wants to quickly earn a few million inf. Maybe to buy some generic IOs, or tog out your alt with some low level sets. Maybe to serve as seed capital for larger, grander schemes. But this should work for anyone. These are not methods to make billions of inf. I like to refer to these methods as “picking up nickels”. You are not going to make a fortune by picking up nickels. But if you pick up a lot of nickels, pretty soon it adds up. NOTE: if lots of people adopt the policies to follow, I would expect profitability to drop or to die completely. So it goes. You take your risks by listening to me in the first place. The first two methods consist of what I call vendor arbitrage. Arbitrage is a term that means buying or selling something for a riskless profit. By buying things from the AH for cheap and selling them to vendors, you are risklessly locking in a profit. It may not be a huge profit, but there is no risk so long as you buy it for less than the vendor pays. The third method involves trading, or market-making, or flipping. You buy something low and sell it for a higher price. These principles will work on any commodity, from common salvage to Winter-Os. Method the First: Vendoring Enhancements (TOs, DOs, SOs) Some people religiously go to the vendor to sell their enhancement drops. I certainly don’t. I usually forget about it until my Enhancement indicator turns red, or until I need space in my trays for crafting or something else. So I type “/AH” and see if anyone is bidding for them. If so, I usually post them for 1 inf. If not, I grumble a bit, and either wait until I go to a store or I just delete them. I am not alone in this kind of behavior. The procedure: 1. Make sure your enhancement tray is empty. 2. Go to a vendor and open up the trade window. 3. Type “/AH”, and click the “For Sale” button that filters by only for-sale items. 4. Browse through your enhancements of choice and put in appropriate bids. 5. Claim your items, then click on the vendor window and sell it. 6. Repeat steps 4,5 until you have enough inf or get bored. These enhancements are NOT fungible by level, meaning you have to put in bids level by level rather than putting in one bid for all available levels. SOs sell for the most, and sell for the most at the highest levels, usually 10-15k at level 50. They are also the low-hanging fruit and the most in demand. Yesterday, I took 10k in seed capital and went to level 50 SOs and bid 5k on each one. If I bought it, I sold it to the vendor. If not, I took down my bid. I went through every type of level 50 SO in about 15 minutes and made about 250k. Then I started again with my filter set at 40-50. In five minutes I had about 2.5mm and I had only made it down to Magic: Enhance Defense. Lesson: don’t go for the low-hanging fruit. TOs sell for a few hundred, so you can often bid 100 and win it. DOs will go for a thousand or two. For bonus points, and for making inf while you are logged off, think ahead and put in pre-emptive bids. I, for one, would appreciate this, especially for TOs and DOs (I spend a lot of time on lowbies). Please note this does not work for IOs, since you cannot sell them to vendors. Method the Second: Vendoring Recipes (generic IOs, rares, commons) For all intents and purposes this is identical to the first method, but using recipes instead of enhancements. The procedure: 1. Make sure your recipe tray is empty. 2. Go to a vendor and open up the trade window. 3. Type “/AH”, and click the “For Sale” button that filters by only for-sale items. 4. Browse through your recipes of choice and put in appropriate bids. 5. Claim your items, then click on the vendor window and sell it. 6. Repeat steps 4,5 until you have enough inf or get bored. The low hanging fruits here are high level generic IO recipes, which will vendor for tens of thousands. In general, this means that they will be harder to come by, and people may already have bids out. However, these things drop like rain, so it never hurts to look. Generic recipes are offered every five levels, and are not fungible. A bid for a level 10 recipe is not considered a bid for a level 50 recipe. Common recipes and rare recipes can also be vendored, but for a lot less inf. I believe that commons go for 100x the level, and rares sell for 200x the level. These recipes are fungible, so that you should always bid at the highest level available, ideally at level 50. If someone sells that recipe at any available level, it will be available to you at the level at which you bid. People tend to use common recipes for crafting strategies, so they may be in short supply or too expensive, but you can pick up a lot of rare recipes for a song. Again, if you think ahead and place pre-emptive bids, you will be doing yourself a favor. You can also buy and vendor salvage, or even inspirations. That’s really picking up nickels, and I’m going to bet you probably don’t need inf that badly. You can make a lot of volume buying common and uncommon salvage and vendoring it, but since you have to sell each one individually, you are capping your profit at 249 or 999 inf per click. It’s too clicky for my tastes. Method the Third: Trading Common Salvage This is the method I generally use every time I start a new alt. You take advantage of the buy-it-now and sell-it-now crowd by being the best buyer and the best seller at the same time. The good thing about it is that is a really fast way to double, redouble, etc. your inf. The bad thing about it is that it is not scalable – you can quickly make a million or two, but more than that gets kind of tedious. It’s also a clicky method. This method works in prime hours, or in the middle of the night. It seems there are always people looking to sell common salvage in order to clean out their inventories and to buy common salvage in order to craft. NOTE: I start all of my new alts the same way nowadays. I go through Outbreak, and the first thing I do when I hit Atlas is level to 2. Then I go to the vendor and sell the two lvl 1 damage TOs the tutorial gives you, for ?80? inf each. This gives you the seed money to post the two large enhancements you also get for 5 inf apiece. This should give you at least 10,000 inf to start this method. The procedure: 1. Type “/AH”. Make sure your AH slots are all empty. You will need them all. 2. Pick a common salvage (I use Inanimate Carbon Rod because it always makes me laugh) and bid on blocks of 10 at the highest outstanding bid (“HOB”). Do this until you run out of AH slots or you are down to a thousand inf. More on this below. 3. Wait. Play your alt. Kill Skuls. You will get blue notifications that you have bought items. 4. At a logical break, open AH again. Collect your salvage, then put it back into the AH in blocks of 10. Offer it at what you think is an appropriate level, ideally at the lowest outstanding offer (“LOO”). More on this below. 5. Kill more Skuls. You will get notifications that you have sold items. 6. At a logical break, collect your sales and repeat the process. The HOB is the level at which you are the best buyer in the market. If anyone is looking to dump salvage by selling at 1 inf or 5 inf, you will be first in line to buy. You can generally figure out what the HOB is by looking at the last 5 sales – if there is a repeated number that is the low end of the range, that’s probably it. Example: 55, 55, 1000, 500, 55. 55 is probably the current HOB. You can ALWAYS find the HOB by selling a single piece of salvage at 1 inf; the price it trades at is the current HOB. Put in your bids at a higher level. You can beat it by 1 inf, you can beat it by 50 inf, just so long as you beat it. Now you are the HOB, and you are first in queue to buy. If the last five trades are all over 250 (the price you can sell to vendors), one of two things is happening. Either the HOB is over 250, or there has been a temporary spate of buying interest that is hiding the HOB. Either wait a few minutes and refresh, or try to buy at what you think the HOB is, or just put in a bid. At this time, I always bid 155 inf. It’s usually high enough to be the HOB, and if it isn’t, it generally will be in a few minutes. The LOO is the level at which you are the lowest seller, and the first person in queue to sell. Taken to its logical extreme, you will always be the LOO if you offer at 1 inf. Sometimes this is a good strategy and sometimes it can lead you to sell at a price lower than where you bought it. I suggest you pick a level at which you think you will sell it soon™. Please note that if you have a specific price target, you should keep it modest. You may want to only sell to bids greater than 1,000, but that’s a pretty high offer and it is possible that you will not make sales soon or even ever. I suggest going with something that is low and reasonable for quick turnover. At this time, I always offer at 255. This generally sells either instantly or within a few minutes. “But Yomo,” you say. “That’s a lot of work for 100 inf!” There are two things going for you. There’s a LOT of volume. You can buy or sell hundreds or thousands of pieces of salvage in minutes. Also, 255 is the absolute minimum price at which I sell, and it usually goes for significantly more. If I am the LOO, and a bid comes in for 100,000, guess who has two thumbs and makes the sale? This guy. Anyway, this is a (in my opinion) fun way to make inf. It will also teach you a lot about how to trade, and you can use these principles for almost anything listed in the AH. Good luck, and happy hunting!

Buying it on the AH and selling it on the AH for a higher price.