Zero to 100 Million in a Week

[Shinobu]

100 Merits = 300 converters = 300 * 100,000 Inf (on average) = 30 million Inf. That's triple the return you get from selling an ATO.

 

300 converters will allow me to convert 40-60 IOs, from which I can make well over 100 million influence, with which I can buy 10 superpacks, from which I can get, on average, more than 10 ATOs.  Just saying.  ^_^

 

But don't let me stop you from convincing people to sell me their converters, because I'm making a lot of money from buying them.

[Yomo Kimyata]

It's win-win!  Everyone gets rich, just like the US housing market in 2007!  What could possibly go wrong?!?!!

[justicebeliever]

It's win-win!  Everyone gets rich, just like the US housing market in 2007!  What could possibly go wrong?!?!!

 

Bad time to be a Force Field bubbler... :)

 

*counts the secs for PK to post..1...2...3...4...*

[Shinobu]

 

I've gotten pretty bad about documenting my progress the last couple of days, but I've continued to craft and list 20 IOs every morning and evening.  This morning I was at about 440 million influence, and I listed 20 new IOs which took care of the last 20 recipes that I'd bought.  I began this project last Tuesday evening, so tonight we'll see how close to 500 million I am, and I think it would be interesting to see what hasn't sold in the past week.

 

I really haven't played the character much.  I'm still at level 24.  But I guess it was a marketing project all along.  8)  Next step would be to set up a build and purchase it, I like to have a build in place from 27 on when I can slot level 30 IOs.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

It's win-win!  Everyone gets rich, just like the US housing market in 2007!  What could possibly go wrong?!?!!

To some extent it's kind of true. Things like purples and such will always be rare but for Uncommon and Rare enhancements the real limiting factor is people spending the time to convert useless enhancements into useful ones. So more people spending time converting enhancements means that more enhancements are available on the market and the price of a non-purple build comes down.

 

Now obviously there's a limit, people won't spend time converting enhancements unless they can make a profit doing so but at the end of the day more people converting means more stuff is available.

[Shinobu]

 

 

 

 

In the end I did not quite hit 500 million influence in a week, and I have 22 IOs still waiting to sell.

 

Looking over what hasn't sold, I can say that most of this will probably sell at some point.  I've obviously priced my Numina's too high, although they were selling at those prices last weekend.  I did sell a few Miracles for over 5 million, probably thanks to that glitch, but that could take a very long time to move.  But the only thing here that I suspect may never sell for my listed price is the Theft of Essence, it probably is in too little demand and there are always people who have listed for less than mine is listed.

 

I'm also not sure why I have an Aegis: Resistance listed for over 5 million, it must have had few for sale when I listed it.  Oh well!

 

 

[Machariel]

This is a fantastic thread.  Thank you for all the hard work you did documenting the effort for the rest of us and congrats on breaking 500 mil (probably) !

[Rainhall]

...they were selling at those prices last weekend. 

 

I think the market is cooling off noticeably.  Starting two days ago, I saw the "magic" starting recipes (guaranteed to flip directly into rare) skyrocket in price.  Since then, my sales have slowed.  A few of my asking prices look too high now, and many others in the 2M range that would have been quick sellers at the end of last week are sitting around.  Many IOs show ~100 offers and ~20 bids.

 

It looks like more and more suppliers have caught on (or read this thread).

 

The very top-priced sellers (for our purposes, not purples, PvPs, etc) are holding their value pretty well.  There may be an avenue for the more aggressive crafters-- those willing to gamble more and more converters to get that Miracle +Recovery or Luck of the Gambler.  Not sure if I'll be in the market over the next couple of days or just keeping an eye on it.  Don't want to wind up on a streetcorner selling converters out of a cup for a penny each.

[Yomo Kimyata]

...they were selling at those prices last weekend. 

 

I think the market is cooling off noticeably.  Starting two days ago, I saw the "magic" starting recipes (guaranteed to flip directly into rare) skyrocket in price.  Since then, my sales have slowed.  A few of my asking prices look too high now, and many others in the 2M range that would have been quick sellers at the end of last week are sitting around.  Many IOs show ~100 offers and ~20 bids.

 

It looks like more and more suppliers have caught on (or read this thread).

 

The very top-priced sellers (for our purposes, not purples, PvPs, etc) are holding their value pretty well.  There may be an avenue for the more aggressive crafters-- those willing to gamble more and more converters to get that Miracle +Recovery or Luck of the Gambler.  Not sure if I'll be in the market over the next couple of days or just keeping an eye on it.  Don't want to wind up on a streetcorner selling converters out of a cup for a penny each.

 

Some of that is going to be weekday v. weekend effect.

 

I also feel that over the long term, prices on almost everything are going to go down.

[Fedifensor]

I also feel that over the long term, prices on almost everything are going to go down.

True.  However, one of CoH's strengths is the ability to have basically unlimited alts.  Once a character is leveled to 50 and gets fully slotted, that character doesn't need further enhancements.  However, when the player starts leveling a different character, they are back on the market purchasing enhancements (funded with earnings from their previous character).  That helps keep demand up, which keeps prices from falling too far.

[justicebeliever]

I also feel that over the long term, prices on almost everything are going to go down.

True.  However, one of CoH's strengths is the ability to have basically unlimited alts.  Once a character is leveled to 50 and gets fully slotted, that character doesn't need further enhancements.  However, when the player starts leveling a different character, they are back on the market purchasing enhancements (funded with earnings from their previous character).  That helps keep demand up, which keeps prices from falling too far.

 

As more and more wealth is created, especially by players using this guide, prices will start to fall, because the demand will drop (people using this guide know how to get rare's for cheap, and won't pay inflated prices for them) and supply for the rares will increase.  There won't be a steady supply of new players to fuel the market...

 

I'm not being negative about this guide (which is awesome), or players who engage in "flipping" (because who could say anything negative about Shinobu), just realistic that it's an economy subject to the same forces of supply and demand as any other...

[Herotu]

I also feel that over the long term, prices on almost everything are going to go down.

True.  However, one of CoH's strengths is the ability to have basically unlimited alts.  Once a character is leveled to 50 and gets fully slotted, that character doesn't need further enhancements.  However, when the player starts leveling a different character, they are back on the market purchasing enhancements (funded with earnings from their previous character).  That helps keep demand up, which keeps prices from falling too far.

 

As more and more wealth is created, especially by players using this guide, prices will start to fall, because the demand will drop (people using this guide know how to get rare's for cheap, and won't pay inflated prices for them) and supply for the rares will increase.  There won't be a steady supply of new players to fuel the market...

 

I'm not being negative about this guide (which is awesome), or players who engage in "flipping" (because who could say anything negative about Shinobu), just realistic that it's an economy subject to the same forces of supply and demand as any other...

 

Whilst I agree that this *should* be the case, ultimately it comes down to this question;

-Will farmers get bored and quit the game faster than people who want to level/gear up new alts?

[Rockfall]

I also feel that over the long term, prices on almost everything are going to go down.

 

Oddly, I feel that over the long term the inf supply is going to go up (*) and drive prices up.

 

*: Unless the devs do something about it by giving people a place to effectively and usefully spend it.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

Oddly, I feel that over the long term the inf supply is going to go up (*) and drive prices up.

Well time will tell but I think if we do see inflation it will be pretty slow. The thing to keep in mind is that the market itself is a pretty large inf sink so for every 1 million inf farmed you get a maximum of 10 million worth of market purchases. So in general the market will tend to stabilize at a point where the amount of inf it's sucking out of the economy is about equal to the amount coming in.

 

Now over time we'll potentially get more people farming and becoming more efficient at farming so we might see some inflation from that but I think it will be relatively slow. If you think back to the market behavior on live, prices were in general reasonably stable, large jumps in prices tended to be associated with the devs making changes to the game (such as AE, introducing alignment merits, or fixing the Hamidon slotting bug) rather than a gradual inflation.

[_NOPE_]

Inspired by your thread Shinobu, I decided to jump into marketeering this weekend, for fun and profit. Since I was out and about with my family all week with limited access to my PC at only periodic moments, it was a perfect time to test this stuff out. So, here's what I did. I had started running those story arcs for my character to build up reward merits, and then turn them in for converters and boosters. Once I got about a million, this was the processed that I finally settled on to start to make inf fairly quick with minimal interaction:

 

[*]Find a popular enhancement set category that contains both uncommons and rares that go from 20 to 50. I settled on "Targeted AoE"

[*]Buy up ALL of the uncommon recipes for that set that don't require rare salvage of any sort, since I was going to rely on the fungibility of the market to do the magic for me. In this case, Air Burst and Detonation, but not all of them.

[*]Make all of those uncommon enhancements

[*]Use my converters to convert Out of Set, but by Set Category of Targeted Aoe:

 

[*]If the bugger converted to the most desired set (in this case Positron's Blast), it's all gravy. I've been throwing them in the market for about 1.5 mill so that they sell reasonably quickly. They cost me maybe 40K to craft, I bought the recipes for maybe under 10K to buy them now, and I used 2 converters, and 75K for listing fee at that price for a total of about.... 325K. That gives me a profit of roughly 1.175 million per enhancement:

 

[*]If instead, I get another uncommon, well I just suck it up and keep converting until I get a rare, because that's still a HUGE profit margin, even doing like 3 conversions using 6 converters:

 

[*]Now, on the quite likely possiblity that I get the LESS desireable rare enhancement set "Annihiliation", no big deal, it just means a slightly different strategy. Instead, I spend one more converter, another 100K, to convert it into some other random rare, and put it on the market for the same 1.5 mill, where it will sell.... eventually:

 

 

By just doing this one single thing over and over again, over the course of the weekend I went from 45 merits to about 89 million influence in my pocket, and over 100 crafted rare enhancements sitting there waiting to sell:

 

 

And I'm now about to DUMP all of them on the market for 1 Inf each, just to see what happens.... for fun, for profit, and for CHAOS! I'm curious to see what the results will be, but yeah, with the market fungibility, and the discrepancy between the cost of converters vs. the value of the enhancements on the market after conversion... this is just WAY too easy for WAY too little work. And I wasn't even waiting that long to see if my goods would go for a higher price!

 

Thanks for the inspiration Shinobu! Happy marketeering to you!

[_NOPE_]

Final results after selling all of them?

 

 

Average sale price was between 200K and 500K, not surprising, so for some of them I probably lost some money, and some I probably still made some money. If I'd let them sit instead of going nuts and dumping them all, I could probably be a very rich man in a couple of weeks, but it's fun to experiment, and maybe I just made a few people happy when the prices of their enhancements dropped considerably for that short window.

 

BTW, the highest "sell it now" value as a Positron's Blast for 2 Mill... the lowest was a Force Feedback... for 1 Inf, LOL.

[Robotech_Master]

I think the market is cooling off noticeably.  Starting two days ago, I saw the "magic" starting recipes (guaranteed to flip directly into rare) skyrocket in price.  Since then, my sales have slowed.  A few of my asking prices look too high now, and many others in the 2M range that would have been quick sellers at the end of last week are sitting around.  Many IOs show ~100 offers and ~20 bids.

I dunno. To a certain extent, this is kind of anecdotal. A countering anecdote: this weekend when I was looking for something to convert and flip, I went back to one of my standby "magic" starting sets, Perplex. There were plenty of Perplex recipes available selling at low 4-digit prices; one of the Perplexes even had zero sitting bids. So I was able to snag a whole bunch of them very easily at 15,000 Inf each.

 

The market does fluctuate. It goes up and down. Sometimes you have to eat your listing fees and pull and re-list at a lower price to clear out your sales inventory. But that's just one of those things.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Oddly, I feel that over the long term the inf supply is going to go up (*) and drive prices up.

Well time will tell but I think if we do see inflation it will be pretty slow. The thing to keep in mind is that the market itself is a pretty large inf sink so for every 1 million inf farmed you get a maximum of 10 million worth of market purchases. So in general the market will tend to stabilize at a point where the amount of inf it's sucking out of the economy is about equal to the amount coming in.

 

Now over time we'll potentially get more people farming and becoming more efficient at farming so we might see some inflation from that but I think it will be relatively slow. If you think back to the market behavior on live, prices were in general reasonably stable, large jumps in prices tended to be associated with the devs making changes to the game (such as AE, introducing alignment merits, or fixing the Hamidon slotting bug) rather than a gradual inflation.

 

+1 inf for showing proper knowledge of the multiplier effect.  1mm farmed means you can spend it in the market.  The person you spent it on can spend 900,000 inf on someone else in the market, who can spend 810,000, etc., summing up to 10mm potentially added to the economy.

 

The question remains, however, if inf aggregation will be faster, slower, or the same as item aggregation, i.e., drops.  I dunno.  Gaining 1mm inf on a 50 is trivial.  Does that 50 also pick up 10mm worth of items in the same run?  I'm starting to think that there is going to be so much inf around, but very little demand for anything but the very best items.

[Justisaur]

I started with 4M inf and spent less than a million (not counting the value of the converters I used), much of which went to listing fees. I was conservative, and after the initial conversion by type to get a rare, I think I did at most two conversions by rarity per enhancement, using 19 converters total. In each case I ended up with enhancements that listed for a minimum of 2.5M. I figured for my first time out, that was a pretty good result, and I didn't want to throw too many converters away chasing something better. I didn't write down the enhancements I ended up listing, but as of this morning 3 had sold for a total of 11M, and the other 3 are still waiting to sell. I know that is chump change to the hardcore, but for someone who would not have even considered this a week ago, it was an encouraging success.

 

Thanks for this, I tried going for things listing for 2.5m or more this way, and I felt it's been better than doing it the way of the original poster.  I actually started doing it slightly different.  Get cheap uncommon - convert by uncommon, if I got in a good category then I'd go for rare, and set that had something highly prized vs. others I'd go in set.  It might be better to go to rare first, but I found this more satisfying for some reason.  I'm wondering time wise if I'd be better off just accepting what I get as long as it's above 1m or so though. 

 

I started this out with my only lv 50, that had 14m inf, and about 90 merits, I kept doing that, buying converters as needed and spent about 8 hours at it and ended up with about 90m and 50 enhancement on the market, unfortunately I probably priced some of them too high... but if they all sold, I'd probably have something like 250 m total.  I woke up this morning with only 32 still in for sale, but didn't record how much that got me, as I was working on my build and started buying stuff before I collected my earnings. 

 

I wasted tons of money along the way often clicking the wrong convert type, or not realizing there was something valuable in there, I re-rolled out of I don't know how many Recharge Intensive Pet types for instance, so you don't have to be all that precise to succeed.

 

I also learned how to get most of the procs & globals that I need through this process instead of buying them, and now have a performance shifter +end, a couple LotGs +7.5%s, a celerity +stealth, a kismet +accuracy, and some others.  As I think none of those need to be attuned to get full effect those are great to get through this process.  Unfortunately anything else is better attuned, so you're better off selling what you get and buying it back attuned.

 

Another note for a quick start. I for some time have been doing a few AE low level boss farms for tickets (fastest farm in the west is one, though I actually think there's better)  which often net me enough tickets to buy a rare salvage in one run of 10-15 minutes (7 with a stalker) which sells for around 500k, so you can get a couple million in under an hour from about level 5.

 

I'm not sure how this fares vs. farming, but I don't have a farming capable character (my 50 maybe after getting all my sets, since it's a plant/kin, but I need those sets first.)

 

I'm actually enjoying this process quite a bit more than I thought I would, It's kind of like gambling where the odds are heavily stacked in your favor.  I also like that this is really crafting, not marketeering, I'm making more valuable things out of combinations of less valuable things so I don't feel this is unethical such as manipulating the market, which I'd never do.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

I'm actually enjoying this process quite a bit more than I thought I would, It's kind of like gambling where the odds are heavily stacked in your favor.  I also like that this is really crafting, not marketeering, I'm making more valuable things out of combinations of less valuable things so I don't feel this is unethical such as manipulating the market, which I'd never do.

Yesssss.... join usssss. Soon your journey to the dark side will be complete.

[AboveTheChemist]

Thanks for this, I tried going for things listing for 2.5m or more this way, and I felt it's been better than doing it the way of the original poster.

 

In the couple of weeks since I wrote that, I got a little more adventurous with the process. I've probably made about 100M but I also had a few setbacks that were valuable lessons. I haven't converted anything in significant volume but I am going to try to devote some more time to it in the next week or two to see how much I can make now that I have a bit more experience. Like you I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would, and I agree with your observation about how it seems like gambling with the odds in your favor.

[Griffinmills]

I also learned how to get most of the procs & globals that I need through this process instead of buying them, and now have a performance shifter +end, a couple LotGs +7.5%s, a celerity +stealth, a kismet +accuracy, and some others.  As I think none of those need to be attuned to get full effect those are great to get through this process.  Unfortunately anything else is better attuned, so you're better off selling what you get and buying it back attuned.

 

I'm actually enjoying this process quite a bit more than I thought I would, It's kind of like gambling where the odds are heavily stacked in your favor.  I also like that this is really crafting, not marketeering, I'm making more valuable things out of combinations of less valuable things so I don't feel this is unethical such as manipulating the market, which I'd never do.

 

Heck yeah, it's really a pretty great little tune up to the new market vs. the old market.  It's a great feeling when you realize just what you can do with all these new tools and it starts playing out.  It really smooths things out.

[Robotech_Master]

I keep discovering new tricks and things to craft. For example, there are categories that just have 1 uncommon and 1 rare set at levels 31 to 50, so any uncommon you craft is guaranteed a one-jump conversion to rare, which then for one more converter you can change to some random other rare.

 

But I recently discovered the same is true for some categories at levels 10-14, too--and that's the range where Karma and Steadfast Protection live. So I could convert uncommons to other uncommons hoping for one of those, then convert the uncommons to rares--or else convert the uncommons to rares and randomly convert them, then if I hit a defense or damage resist set, convert them back.

[Papaschtroumpf]

At 50 with XP turned off, running a +4 ITF without trying to speed through it (e.g. kill all ambushes in the second mission) is worth approx 30 millions. I see LFT request for "BM farms" that probably have even higher inf per hour. So 90 millions in 8 hours doesn't sound like a very good use of my precious play time slogging through buying, crafting and selling enhacements.

Glad different people find their own way to make inf and enjoy the game.

[Robotech_Master]

90 million in 8 hours is really a poor return on crafting time investment. I could easily make that much putting a half hour into crafting and listing activity, then going away for a few hours.

 

I'm on my way home from work now, looking forward to seeing how much a half hour or so of activity last night before bedtime has brought me. If it's much below 90 million, I'll be very surprised.

 

(Edit: Turns out to have been a hair short of 84 million. And part of that was from selling some ATOs, unslotters, boosters, etc. that I bought from Super Packs, but it's still part and parcel of the same activity.)