A Meandering Path to a Billion Inf

[Yomo Kimyata]

Just now, Andreah said:

... I may have been market-PvP'ing with you over those 😃

 

But I quit too, it was fun, but not a lot of profit/effort.

 

In another game, I recall doing that kind of dance with the intent of driving my competitor up to bidding high enough to beat me, that I could suddenly dump my inventory into their lap at a profit. 

Just now someone was bidding 50,000 and I sold about 150 into that bid.

[Andreah]

Just now, Yomo Kimyata said:

Just now someone was bidding 50,000 and I sold about 150 into that bid.

I logged in to check and saw that. LOL, 50k? O.o 22.5k should be the break-even with rare salvage currently going at 500k. 

 

It's moments like this when I wonder if someone is messing around and having a good time at a loss, or if they know something we don't. 😮

[Aeroprism]

6 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

... and sure enough, I saved myself 20 inf in total... 

 

I can't get enough of your posts 😄

 

I bought a bunch (about 200) Winter packs when they were on sale. Opened them all, rejoiced in the rain of Merits/brainstorms and for now, I keep all the ATOs warm and cozy while all the other people who have done the same liquidate theirs.  Slowly but surely, avalanches gain in value...

[tidge]

On 2/19/2021 at 7:51 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

Playing rare roulette is part art, part study in statistics.  I usually budget 10 converters per IO to make it worth "something" but I rarely use anything close to that.  In this mini case-study, I have 22 IOs that I want to hit my sales price bogey.  I usually set that bogey at around 2mm, but sometimes more, sometimes less.  This takes a bit of practice and knowing what can change into what easily.  Generally, I will convert a random rare once by rarity (pull up the Convert menu, drag the Celerity to the top, select the Out-of-Set Conversion radio button, and use the (default) Rarity: Rare setting).  But how do I know if it's valuable or not?  A good shortcut is to ask yourself if you have ever slotted it yourself or if you find it useful.  A slightly longer cut is to move it to the AH and check the trade history.  At this point in my career, I have a pretty good idea of what items are worth "something".  But sometimes I'm wrong.  I've never slotted a Rectified Reticle, but I've sold oodles of them.

 

Sometimes you will get an item that isn't very valuable in and of itself, but it can be converted in set to something valuable.  Or it can be converted by category to something valuable.  Example:  I roll a lvl 20 Impervium Armor Resistance IO.  That's probably worth something by itself.  If I convert it in set, I can eventually get the +psionic resist IO which is generally worth a fair amount more.  If I convert it by Resist Damage, I can end up with a Steadfast Protection or an Unbreakable Guard.  You can run the odds if you like, but often either way will be ok.  I'll talk a lot more about converting in set at a future point in time but I'll tell you this one right now:  I always convert a Steadfast in set until I get the Defense, and I always convert a Kismet until I get the Accuracy.

 

If you really have no idea what something is worth, think about what your bogey is.  Then see if it has traded for less than that amount in the last five; if so, reroll.  Just don't set your bogey too high or you will be rolling a long, long time.

The above quote exactly describes my process, including the converter budget and the target price point.

 

The ONLY quibble I have (and this is more about me than the method above) is that I often slot pieces/sets that the market doesn't 'appreciate'. For example, I think Thunderstrike and Mocking Beratement are very undervalued (uncommons) and the market on Basilisk's Gaze and Expedient Reinforcement (two rare sets with good 4-slot set bonuses) is either feast-or-famine.

[Aeroprism]

On 3/2/2021 at 12:26 PM, tidge said:

The above quote exactly describes my process, including the converter budget and the target price point.

 

The ONLY quibble I have (and this is more about me than the method above) is that I often slot pieces/sets that the market doesn't 'appreciate'. For example, I think Thunderstrike and Mocking Beratement are very undervalued (uncommons) and the market on Basilisk's Gaze and Expedient Reinforcement (two rare sets with good 4-slot set bonuses) is either feast-or-famine.

I also use Mocking Beratement and I agree 100% with this. 

 

The maturity of this game means that most viable builds have been tested and proved so new players will just copy/paste and natural exploration of other builds get lost in the process.

[Yomo Kimyata]

The Terrigen Miss just finished Noble Savage's and Katie Douglas' arcs and, yeah, now we're talking!  I had been considering moving up to +3/x1 but nerp, I'm sticking at +2!  The Possessed and Apparitions, especially the bosses, are no jokes, and I'm really enjoying it.  I just dinged 24, and am experimenting a bit with Experimentation.  At 24, I wrestled between adding Corrosive Vial or Adrenal Booster and went with the former.  It's still new to me, but combined with Weaken and Envenom, it really helps with tough bosses.  I'll try AB at some point, and there will certainly be at least one more respec in my future.  I may have made a mistake in picking up Kick and Tough already.  I think I could use Maneuvers and Tactics from Leadership a lot more.  Also, since I mostly play melee characters, I've still relatively new to the mechanics of snipes, at least the whole fast-snipe-with-slow-snipe-damage.

 

Right now I've got Toxic Dart, X-Ray Beam, and Proton Volley 5-slotted with Decimation; Electron Haze 3-slotted with Vigilant Assault and two procs; Irradiation 4-slotted with 3 procs and an accuracy SO.  Don't sweat using respecs or unslotters -- I got 2 of the former and dozens of the latter from my Hero Pack experiment. 

 

Speaking of which, I streamlined my process a bit to hurry it up.  I had sold 30 of the 51 ATOs at my price by today.  My planned system had been to take down the remaining 21 ATOs (costing 5% of the posting fee), convert once by ATO (costing 1 converter) and repost at my original price.  Instead, I reposted at a discount price, just to move past this chapter, since we're moving closer to our goal of 1bn and since I'm starting to run out of relevant lessons.  

 

One thing that was interesting was that the unsold ATOs weren't all the ones you would expect (less frequently played ATs, crappy sets) but included some really popular items.  This brings me to the madness of crowds and overreacting.  Sometimes, suppliers of goods lose sight of the forest for the trees and overproduce popular items by changing unpopular items into popular items.  But unpopular doesn't necessarily mean no demand.  So in my ATO example, I had unsold brute ATOs and sold Kheldian ATOs, all at the same price.  Another example is in Luck of the Gamblers:  Normally, the most popular ones are the proc, the Def, and the Def/End and the other three tend to lag in flow and/or price.  Well, not very long ago the supply of the D/E/R dropped pretty low, presumably because people were not putting them on the market and were instead converting them to the top three.  So when I noticed that, I saved myself some converters and started selling them directly.  

 

I am a big fan of putting together systems for making inf.  My favorite systems are what I like to call "sustainable factories" -- I like to identify items that are in high or at least consistent demand, and to create them by using other materials that I can replenish in short order.  And I like to do this in blocks that I can sell to real end user demand on a daily basis.  A theoretical factory would be putting in bids on lvl 41 Red Fortune recipes, crafting them to IOs, converting until you get a LotG, converting the crappy LotG IOs to the good ones, putting them up for sale, and putting more bids in on the recipes.  Assuming no market pvp (lol), this is sustainable so long as you are able to buy more recipes as fast as you are able to or want to make and sell LotG IOs.  Some of my factories lag in supply and I have to wait to replenish.  Some of my factories lag in demand, so I have to be careful not to choke the market with too much supply.  And my favorite, of course, are those Goldilocks factories where I steal everything from the bears and then have them killed  am able to spit out product as fast as I want to. 

 

Don't get me wrong, rare roulette is great!  It's a wonderful way to put out as much product as you feel like making and it's good bank.  But having a good system (and periodically rechecking your assumptions and changing things if necessary) is potentially much more profitable and definitely faster.

 

I'm in the process of getting rid of all the inventory I accumulated (the Kinetic Crash and Paralytic recipes which I will craft and crack), and I'm currently in the beta stage of our newest factory.  I suspect it will be limited by true end demand, but it's looking promising.  I think I need to get through a weekend with its normally increased demand before I can make a real judgment on its value.  Currently at about 650mm in straight cash inf homey, and have 65 items for sale.

 

Stay frosty.

[Yomo Kimyata]

I've made it up to Master Midnight, Miss T is 26 (just picked up Adrenal Booster -- I'll respec to Poison Trap another time), and maybe I'm not levelling quickly enough.  I don't like to look ahead, but I think I only have two arcs left in First Ward, so I doubt I'll be 29 by the end of Vanessa Vavavoom.  I've finally got a few complains about content in the First Ward.  I'm sure lots of this is unfamiliarity with the content, but they are complains nonetheless.  The final mission in Blind Melon's arc is needlessly tedious.  It's teneedlious.  I get that redside has lots more ambushes than blueside, but goldside seems to be taking this to an extreme.  Five waves for four accompanying NPCs, AND it's an enemy you have to kill twice.  Teneedlious.  A less solid complaint is that in the missions that you have a companion, often that companion is needlessly overpowered.  It's overneepowlied.  Sometimes I feel like a doorsitter in an AE mission.  Just kidding, how in the world would I know how THAT feels? HA HA HA!

 

I think I overpriced some of my goods last time.  Thanks to circumstances, I often forget what day of the week it is and I've generally noticed that IOs tend to hit a low point in value Wednesday/Thursday.  I'm not sure if that's a lack of demand before the weekend, or if it's a bunch of marketers pushing supply into the market in front of the weekend.  Probably a bit of both.  I've put in some bids for a bunch of things that I think I can turn around quickly, but we'll see how quickly those bids fill.  

 

It's also time to go through my recipe inventory again.  Look out for those orange recipes which don't need rares (yay!) and for those yellow recipes that do (boo!).  Rare salvage has gotten very pricy of late, and I ain't paying no fifty cents for no Coke.  This time around I crafted 14 yellow recipes, and hey, there's a Gladiator's Net (PvP) and a Impervious Skin (easily transformed to a Steadfast Protection).  Guess I'm paying fifty cents each for two Cokes.

 

Now when I talk about "stupid market tricks," I'm not actually saying that they are, in fact, stupid.  I'm just saying in many cases it's not someone looking to make a profit, but it's more often someone just trying to poke the market with a stick and see what happens.  Something like that is going on in both uncommon (yellow) and rare (orange) salvage right now.  In yellow-land, there is a consistent heavy buyer at 1,001, and there is often a heavy seller at 1,002 -- possibly the same person.  Why?  Who knows.   If it is one person, they are losing about 100 inf per trade round trip, but keep in mind that really isn't a lot of money.  Perhaps someone is trying to get the Power Seller badge on all of their alts?  Who knows.  Rares are a bit more enigmatic.  Prices have been going up up up over the two weeks I've been writing this, and there are deep buyers, like thousands deep.  There doesn't seem to be a profit to be made here, since buying at 500k means you need to sell at 555k+ in order to break even after the fees.  So maybe it's just someone feeling their oats.  Regardless, I've got a stash of rares for just such an occasion.  Not specific rares, just thousands of Alien Blood Samples I've been holding onto just in case someone wanted to try and push rares back up towards the seeded ceiling of 1mm.  Yeah, I'm going to eat the transaction fees and the bid-offer spread, but in case prices get pushed north of 600-700k I'll be ready.  Needless to say, Miss T doesn't have such a stash, so she's just going to have to buy things where she can.

 

EDIT:  Ok, here's an example of what I mean by weird and wacky goings-ons.  So I ended up buying a bunch more rares, then ended up selling the extras.  I bought all of these at exactly 500,000 (and the brainstorms I bought at 20,002): 

 

 

So yeah, somehow people ended up paying OVER A MILLION on average for these rares.  I mean, yes, they are Yomo-owned and Yomo-approved, but that means that people bid well over the seeded price for some of these.  And the rich get richer.  This is a real headscratcher!

 

I think I'm at the point where I can't think of a particular topic for discussion for each post anymore, so I'm going to open this up for requests.  There are only three topics that I will not fully divulge at this point in time -- everything else is fair game as far as I'm concerned.  One is my exact pricing strategy, both for buying and selling.  I feel that it's kind of my competitive advantage, so I'll be happy to give generalizations but not what I do exactly.  The second and the third will remain shrouded in secrecy for the time being, which undoubtedly means that they will be the first two things people ask about.  So ask away.

 

See you on the other side, Ray.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 5, 2021 by Yomo Kimyata
pictures!

[Aeroprism]

I sell rare salvage ALL THE TIME and it never sells over 500K. Never.  Yet you show us this.

 

I sell common and uncommon salvage EVEN MORE ALL THE TIME and I never get more than pocket change, yet the other day in another topic you showed how someone paid you three point five Bezos for something trivial like Iron.

 

I think you're blessed.  Or cursed.  Or really really lucky.

 

Either way, I have no particular questions.  My marketing strategy is already well implemented. Not as fast as yours but certainly as efficient and, as you once said in another topic: placement, patience, volume. 

 

You have knack for finding new strategies. I suck at it, abysmally.  I would not spot a niche/opportunity if it hit me in the face. 

What I'm really good at is take existing strategies and improve them. (I did internal ISO audits for years as a living so, improving systems is pretty much a thing I enjoy).

[Yomo Kimyata]

16 minutes ago, Aeroprism said:

I sell rare salvage ALL THE TIME and it never sells over 500K. Never.  Yet you show us this.

 

I sell common and uncommon salvage EVEN MORE ALL THE TIME and I never get more than pocket change, yet the other day in another topic you showed how someone paid you three point five Bezos for something trivial like Iron.

 

I think you're blessed.  Or cursed.  Or really really lucky.

 

Either way, I have no particular questions.  My marketing strategy is already well implemented. Not as fast as yours but certainly as efficient and, as you once said in another topic: placement, patience, volume. 

 

You have knack for finding new strategies. I suck at it, abysmally.  I would not spot a niche/opportunity if it hit me in the face. 

What I'm really good at is take existing strategies and improve them. (I did internal ISO audits for years as a living so, improving systems is pretty much a thing I enjoy).

Go back to that other post.  Maybe browse a few entries higher in the chain.  You'll find out what the T stands for, and it in part accounts for my blessedness/cursedness/luckiness...

[Aeroprism]

You know what the funny part is?  Beside my farmer, I only have one level 50 and the reason he is level 50 is because I thought I could farm with a Tank (You can, but it's slow).

 

All that Inf spread over all my alts, always thinking "I need more so I can afford all those super cool builds." The builds. On the characters I don't have.

 

Yeah.  I think I just love the market game 😉

[Troyusrex]

1 hour ago, Aeroprism said:

Yeah.  I think I just love the market game 😉

One of us! 

[Yomo Kimyata]

I knew I was getting close to the fabled one billion mark, so I figured I'd put in a little extra effort to push across that finish line.

 

Luck of the Gambler is always a good, fast seller.  I've talked about lvl 41 Red Fortune recipes recently, so instead I decided to look at lvl 41 Reactive Defenses recipes.  Wow, at just over 2mm a piece, plus a rare salvage and crafting fees, that's close to 3mm all in.  And yet, well within my profit zone, so I put in bids on all five non-proc recipes at 10x apiece and ran a few missions.  But something was eating at me.  Why didn't I check Red Fortunes as well?  Surely someone read my post, and the cost of buying and crafting a Red Fortune must be approximately that of doing the same for a Reactive Defenses, right?  Right?!?  You would expect that some young entrepreneur would be bidding up the Red Fortunes so it would be roughly equivalent in cost.  Nerp.  By the time I checked to see that not only were Red Fortunes not about a rare recipe's worth more expense than Reactive Defenses, they were actually 400k cheaper.  How foolish of me!  By this time I had bought 30 Reactive Defenses, so I canceled the rest of my bids there, shifted my bids to Red Fortunes (bought 14 of those in short order), then did my magic:  craft, convert by category: defense (where you have a 50% shot to either get a LotG or a not-LotG) until LotG, then decide whether or not to convert in set or not.  I think I only converted the End/Recharge and the Def/Recharge IOs in set.  LotGs are the gold standard of set IOs.  Every character I have north of level 22 has somewhere between two and twenty of these, and I just can't see people not needing them.

 

I also pulled out another factory of mine I have recently let fall to the wayside:  lvl 41 Titanium Coatings.  These uncommon recipes will convert once by category: resist damage into either Aegis (decent) or Unbreakable Guard (better) and those are both good sellers with a lot of real end user demand.  Putting in 10x bids on every recipe in the set quickly got me 60 recipes for cheap, and I put them to work.  Not surprisingly, there are members of the Aegis and Unbreakable Guard sets that I reroll in set because they just aren't that popular.

 

So I worked on this magic while finishing up Master Midnight's arc.  Floated a bit around First Ward taking in the sights.  Soloed the Seed of Hamidon.  Oh I could tell you blood curdling stories, but they probably wouldn't be true.  Still at level 26, but we just hit our titular goal:

 

 

I hope you've enjoyed reading about my little story as much as I enjoyed writing it.  Over 15 days I hope I've demonstrated a lot of different ideas and shown that accumulating more inf than you can ever really need is easy, stressless, and dare I say, fun?  Feel free to reach out to me anytime.

 

Best, Yomo

[Sakai]

This journey inspires me Yomo. I have read countless times about self sufficient characters. I have tried a few times but usually lose heart somewhere along the way. 

 

I don't know what I am going to make  but I will try the Miss T method. I've learned a lot watching your journey. No longer is converting IOs a dreadful slog, well it still is but not nearly what it once was.  

 

I make a fortune on Kismets as well, after all, who doesn't want to slot one. 

 

It amused me when you mentioned Rectified Reticle. It was the path to my first billion live and it was by mere coincidence that it was one of my first drops here. I was off. The market on that has  definitely taken a bit of a hit since you mentioned it but I've been through that before. I'm playing in other fields now so I will just leave it alone until people get bored of it  they always do. Then come back for my untold millions. 

 

I think this is one of the best guides there is. Informative, entertaining and interactive. 

 

Best of all  I learned it is possible to solo Seeds Of Hamidon. Had no idea. Excited. 

 

Thank you. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

11 hours ago, Sakai said:

 

 

Best of all  I learned it is possible to solo Seeds Of Hamidon. Had no idea. Excited. 

 

I did solo it.  I didn't win, though.

[Yomo Kimyata]

I know, I know, this should be over already.  But after picking up the double xp from the P2W vendor, I was resigned to running the Praetorian version of radio missions until I hit 30.  After all, I had finished Vanessa's arc, and she didn't introduce anyone, so...  And then I discovered that Mistress Maria was available at sub-30, and so I snuck my way into Night Ward at 27 and dinged 28 just before getting introduced to the Zombie Montague.  There's some strange stuff happening in the Night Ward.  I feel like I'm in Beauty and the Beast and I'm being attacked by anthropomorphized lanterns and candlesticks and flashlights and whatever else has a thirst for Miss T's ichor.

 

The main reason I wanted to make this post, however, is because one of our mysteries has become more clear.  At some point over the weekend, someone crashed the rare salvage market by selling something over 5k units (it could have been a lot more than that, I couldn't tell you).  This helps to explain why rares have been on an upward path recently; Occam's Razor tells me that someone was accumulating them in order to see what would happen.  It could have been ... YOU!  Well, good for them!  If it was, in fact, the same person, they got some entertainment and maybe a real life demonstration of Economics 101.  They certainly didn't make any profit, but not everyone needs profit all the time.

 

You know who's got two thumbs and DID make inf out of this?  That's right, it was Two Thumb Charlie.  Good guy, Charlie.  I love events like this, which I term micro-macro events.  I think of macro events as a fundamental change in the game, like new power sets, or lvl 53 HOs, or even discount prices on Winter Packs.  I think of micro events as the day-to-day flow of supply and demand.  This was an event that was certainly big enough to move the market in the short run.  But you may be looking at the last 5 and ask yourself, wait, things look pretty much the same as they did last week?!?  And that's probably because we may have reached a new equilibrium that is pretty close to the last one.  I think of layers of unknown bids in the market for something like rare salvage as bodies buried in the backyard.  I have buried a few myself, and I've observed where a lot of other people are burying bodies.  But as time goes by, it gets more complex, and I'm less certain about where all the bodies are.  And then someone clears out all the outstanding bids over a certain level, and it's like a backhoe just went through the backyard and cleared it all out.  And now there are some new bodies!

 

Miss T is sitting on about 1.2 large right now, and most of her activity is new niche related.  The jury is still out on whether or not she will pursue this short- or long-term.  But I did notice something the other day when looking at Reactive Defenses, speaking of buried bodies:

 

 

If you see a trading history like this, you can feel pretty confident that some parasitic antisocial predator has put in a chunk of bids at that level.  On the flip side, you can probably thank that parasitic antisocial predator for bidding higher than anyone else.  And you can also probably thank them for making them into LotG recharges that you can buy at 6mm or under.

 

To your health!

Edited March 8, 2021 by Yomo Kimyata

[Hew]

Ive dumped some people into this thread with woe-is-me i cant find inf. Hopefully they are lucky. 🙂

 

For me, its just a matter of time to commit to marketing.

[Outrider_01]

Really fucking tired of the forum eating my posts for hitting back space once.

 

tl;dr - run tutorial, turn 120 into 500k, 30-45 mins, buy and scrap SO level 50-54 for 50 inf on the AH,  Sell to vendor for 8k to 15k.  Standard stuff like DMG/ACC sell high end white fear and -tohit are the low end.  

[Ura Hero]

I decided to try doing a self sufficient toon a few weeks ago just for kicks.

 

Started at Level 1 in Atlas Park.  Did a couple of DFB runs to get to level 9.  Flew around Atlas Park, Kings Row, Steel Canyon and Skyway and got all the exploration badges; 20 merits.  Converted to Enhancement Convertors.  Sold a few for seed money.  Bought some low priced IOs and converted to something worth more.  Sold on the AH.  Rinse, Repeat.  Got enough influence to play in my usual market spot and ramped that up to 250M influence in a reasonable time frame.

 

It's doable and most of it was done while I was logged off or playing.  I could have made more, but I had achieved my goal of proving that the character could self fund easily enough.

[arcane]

Where I struggle most with lucrative marketeering (besides the number one reason: patience), is not using too many converters. It’s tough to know if I should shoot for a better orange IO or settle for one that could sell for a million. It’s so tempting to try to score a LotG. So I appreciate that you wrote how you budget only about 10 per recipe. Will read this more a little later.

[Andreah]

On 5/7/2021 at 1:10 PM, arcane said:

Where I struggle most with lucrative marketeering (besides the number one reason: patience), is not using too many converters. It’s tough to know if I should shoot for a better orange IO or settle for one that could sell for a million. It’s so tempting to try to score a LotG. So I appreciate that you wrote how you budget only about 10 per recipe. Will read this more a little later.

I never plan to have to be lucky to get a profit.

 

I work out the averages, and then I count on the law of large numbers for doing what looks right on average in great volume. 

 

I'm going to make a profit doing X ten thousand times over or I'm not going to do X at all.

 

When ever you do a conversion, there are only so many things an IO can convert into. Some of those take you closer to what you want to end with, and some don't. For making, say, LoTG's from a certain start, count the number of equally likely outcomes at each step and then ratio the number that yield a success vs a failure. (Or you can have done it enough times and recorded your data well enough to be confident you have a good estimate of the expected number of trials before success) This probability of success is your Bernoulli sequence rate parameter, and you can use that to determine the average number of conversion attempts needed to achieve success .. 1/p, where p is the probability of success. (In the stat literature, Bernoulli sequences are often termed as runs of successes before a failure, so we're backwards of that -- number of failures before a success. )

 

From this you can estimate your average production cost, and then from that, the cost of the starting input, the cost of the converters, and the market fee you'll need to pay, work out the minimum listing price you can list at for a profit, and compare that to the typical selling prices on the market. Your strategy to choose a price to list at to sell fast may not be at the minimum profitable price, of course, especially in a high volume and competitive market like LotG's, and that's another topic entirely. 🙂

 

Maybe that's worth a quick discussion anyway. If you have one LotG to sell, you could list it pretty close to the median sell price, and get it to sell overnight, or worst case, a few days. But if you're making 100 of them every day, you need them to sell fast, and you can't list them all that high -- most will still be there tomorrow, and you'll run out of market slots after you make the next batch of 100. You'd need to list them low, so of the, I don't know, ~200 (?) LotG's that sell every day, half of them are yours so you don't build up a big inventory backlog.

 

But the problem with listing 100 LotG's every day at the same price, well below market to achieve volume, is a predator on the market (*humms innocently*) might deliberately put in a series singleton bids to try to figure out who's listing low for volume, and snipe most of them away, only to relist on alts with extra, otherwise unused, auction slots. Or worse, list their 100's of LotG's 1 Inf below yours. Ideally, you want to do this to them -- list your goods 1 inf below where they're trying to sell, and have low enough production costs you can make a profit even if that's the price you sell at. Or at least -Know- that you can, while they're not sure because they didn't do the arithmetic.

 

How do you defend yourself from all this? Watch for patterns in the prices you sell at. List at several price points. Don't get obsessed with number patterns (don't always buy at 5,123,456 or at 10,111,111) Keep your production costs low and your pockets deep, so you can ride out price wars. Be diversified, so you can let go of any one market niche for days or weeks at a time.  Have several broad strategies for marketeering -- flipping/arbitrage, crafting, converting, super-packing, and switch between them when it seems appropriate.

[Bionic_Flea]

I have learned and deduced several things from this thread, but I shall put them in the form of a multiple choice question to see if others were paying attention.

 

A) Yomo and Miss Terrigen are Inhuman.

B) There are many ways to make influence.

C) Yomo and/or Ms. T are petrochemical engineers.

D) Praetoria is a pretty but mean, hard place with many ambushes.

E) All of the above.

F) B and D only.

 

Also:

 

Edited May 10, 2021 by Bionic_Flea

[lemming]

My Praetorian, "New Kind of Kick" is level 44 now and been mostly self sufficient in her enhancements.  I think the only non-solo stuff she's done is over the winter event and SBB, but I'll see if I can get into a CoP starting in Pocket D or Echo.

 

Most of the information gained has been via recipe conversion.

[gec72]

Figured I'd poke my head in here...I have been employing the "buy 10 yellows, convert to rare, convert to better rare" method for a while now, fully endorse. I am sure I don't do it optimally, but don't really care. I probably have on the order of 500 recipes waiting to be crafted and normally buy another 10 for each 10 I pick up out of the AH. I'll basically post anything that has a good bidding/available ratio that will sell for 1M+. Not worth the time to worry any more than that on hitting the big sellers, I figure I'll see some of them often enough anyway.

 

I don't know if I'm optimal with my choices on converters either - sometimes I'll buy them on the AH, sometimes I'll cash in merits. I figure I'll just replenish those through buying Super Packs.

 

I likely have more assets than I'll need for a good while (have been accumulating faster than leveling), so I have a hard time sweating my market inefficiencies. 

[arcane]

On 5/7/2021 at 1:10 PM, arcane said:

Where I struggle most with lucrative marketeering (besides the number one reason: patience), is not using too many converters. It’s tough to know if I should shoot for a better orange IO or settle for one that could sell for a million. It’s so tempting to try to score a LotG. So I appreciate that you wrote how you budget only about 10 per recipe. Will read this more a little later.

Since making this post, I have decided to revisit marketeering (which I usually find too tedious) and committed to making at least half a billion (hopefully a billion but it’s getting boring fast) on a character without any other gameplay. So no playing that character outside the market until this experiment is over.

 

I have been logging into the character typically once at the beginning of my playtime and once at the end. As of last night, I was at about 350 million, having started with 5 million 5 or 6 days ago. Not horrible.

[Bionic_Flea]

On 5/13/2021 at 11:43 AM, arcane said:

I have been logging into the character typically once at the beginning of my playtime and once at the end. As of last night, I was at about 350 million, having started with 5 million 5 or 6 days ago.