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The Heroic Marketeer

And so it begins. I tire of the complaints about how unfair the market is to the lowbie. So here I chronicle my brand new level 1 warshade, the “Heroic Marketeer” (often referred to below as simply HM) built with the purpose of getting rich at a low level (initial plan was level 1, but see a few paragraphs below).

It begins: Heroic takes out 2 minions, earning 7 influence each, plus the rescue bonus of 3 influence. From here on, all influence will be based on this starting income.

First stop, the market, where I will bid for 10 circuit boards for 1 influence each. Obviously, my intention is to first buy cheap common salvage and sell it to vendors for 250 inf. Logout at 17:29 on April 25th. Will check back later tonight and start making profits.

First pick-up and sell session, I take and sell his circuit board winnings, dumping 9 on the Atlas Park generic merchant by Ms. Liberty and returning 1 to the market which sold for 20 influence. After this brief bit, Heroic was sitting on 2267 influence. I have quickly realized a potential problem with my initial plan and am considering an amended marketeering play. According to this leveling chart at ParagonWiki, a level 5 character has access to 30 salvage slots and 6 market transaction slots. This should be more than enough for Heroic Marketeer to become a multi-millionaire in a few days to a few weeks. At level one, well, maybe not so much. Still possible, but too slow to be feasible.

I am currently playing only with the initial salvage and market slots, but since a brand new character starts with only 1 market slot and 3 salvage slots, I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle the tedium. At the very least, I will probably level to 2nd in order to have 2 market transaction slots and 4 salvage slots, at which point I’ll evaluate whether he needs to go higher than that. I am considering, however, just toughing it out and using the various recipe, salvage, and transaction slot increasing badging options instead to grow my options.

As of this writing, HM has less game time than it has taken for me to chronicle what I am doing with him. At logout, he had 1007 influence and a bid for 9 Chaos Theorems on the market for 226 each. He won 1 at that price, which I sold for 1000 influence, thus the 1007 he has now.

Went ahead and leveled to 2nd, getting another market slot. I have a bid for 10 Chaos Theorem for 111 and a bid for 10 at 112 using up my slots currently. At logout, I had 7865 influence on hand in addition to my outstanding bids. When next I login, I’ll start selling in hopes of earning a badge and getting more transaction slots.

Buy and Sell time again. Picked up my 20 Chaos Theorems. Sold 10 to the store for 10,000 and put 10 on the market for 217 in hopes of earning market badges and getting more slots. Put in a bid for 10 alchemical gold for 1766 each, with hopes to sell them back to the market for 2 to 10 times that. Total play time is currently 34 minutes, according to an “M” pedestrian.

Another buy/sell session – got all 10 Alchemical Gold salvage for 1766, and have re-listed them in hopes of getting 3017 or better from them. Also sold 10 Chaos Theorems for 12,212 after fees (13457-1245). Earned the Vendor badge for selling 10 items. I’m not far from getting my Scrounger badge so I can hold 6 salvage at a time, although Merchant (250 items) and Retailer (1000 items) for more transaction slots will take a while with only 2 transaction slots. I may advance another level or 2 just for the extra slots I’ll get.

At logout, HM has 10,807 influence, 10 Alchemical Gold listed for sale, and a bid for 10 Circuit Boards for 1 inf each waiting. The Circuit Boards are fodder for getting my sales badges so I can get more slots soon. It only took about 2 minutes to perform this sessions pick-up/sell/drop-off actions, but I forgot to log out while typing up this session’s details. More tonight when I have a chance to really sit and focus on the market work I need to get done.

2008-04-26 @ 19:21 – All 10 Alch Gold sold for 52,850 (57,055 – 4,205) and all 10 circuit boards were purchased for 1 influence. Listed all 10 circuit boards for 13 influence each and immediately got 950 influence (1000 – 50) for the stack of 10. Close to a slot awarding badge as noted above. Put in a bid for 10 circuit boards at 1 influence each and 10 alchemical gold for 277 each. Log out with 61,777 on hand.

2008-04-27 @ 00:39 – No successful Alch Gold purchases, but all 10 Circuit Boards were purchased. Listed them for sale for 1 influence each, and they all sold in about 30 seconds. Earnings for the sale are 2842 (3102 – 260). Cancelled the Alch Gold bids and put in a new set of bids for 10 at 501 (more than I want to pay, but I’m optimistic that I can still earn a decent profit come sell time in the morning), plus 10 more circuit boards for 1 influence each. Inf holdings at logout: 62,319.

2008-04-27 @ 10:08 – Picked up and sold my winnings. Sold 8 circuit boards to the store, deleted the other 2 just to finish the session quicker. Picked up all 10 A.Gold and listed for sale at 677 influence. Bid on 10 more circuit boards at 1 influence each. Logged out with 64,005 influence on my character, and 2 boards already purchased before the logout countdown completed. Need to find a new salvage area to hit in hopes of speeding up my earnings per stack now. I hope to hit 100,000 before the end of the day, but time limitations may prevent that.

2008-04-27 @ 12:48 – Buy and sell time. Achieved a badge:

hm-slots01.jpg

This helps, as I now have room for 6 salvage at a time in my inventory, but I still have a long way to go to more viable market movement speed. Getting here included earning 8630 (9222 – 592) on my A.Gold sales, picking up and selling my boards (total 950 after market fees), and putting in bids for 7 diamonds at 10,001 each all during this login. I’m hoping to sell them for 18,000 to 20,000 each next login, which will push me well over 100,000, and I expect to have 1-2 more times to login and move products around for profit.

If all goes well, I’ll be in range of Mu Vestments or Soul Trapped Gems by Wednesday or Thursday, at which point I’ll start really moving up in the earnings tree. At this point, I’m confident I’ll hit a million before the end of next week-end (May 5th), but I will admit that I’ve been wrong on my market expectations before. A further prediction is I should hit the 100,000,000 mark before the end of May, if I don’t get bored with the project or tied up in other things. If I’m correct on that, I should flip some desirable purple recipe within 3-4 weeks for big profits.

2008-04-28 @ 00:05 – Screwed up on selling Diamonds. Had to take them off the market, sell one to the store at a loss to get enough influence to list the others, and try listing one at slightly above what I bought it for. Have to reset my thinking in the morning and try again to break 100,000.

2008-04-28 @ 10:28 – Well, I feel like someone is reading this and playing sugar-daddy (or -momma, I’m not picky) at this point.

hm-sales01a.jpgWhen I logged in this morning, my 1 diamond had sold for 50,000, and the next one I put up for sale sold for 60,000. Currently, here is where HM stands on buying and selling:

hm-sales01.jpg

Clearly, once I pick up my influence and turn those buys around, I’ll be well past 100,000. Even assuming no sugar-daddy/-momma activity beyond this, the 2 big sales should make it much easier to push to 1 million. I hope to be in range of Chronal Skips for buying and selling before then end of the week. A few flips on those, and I should be able to hit 1 million and start working on Mu Vestments.

Thanks to a tip from in-game friend, I’m going to start working on crafting badges, too, as eventually earning the Field Crafter badge and the portable crafting table should significantly speed up a level 2 characters market profiteering. I will also begin working on getting endurance modification recipes memorized, as that is where the easy influence is for selling IOs. I doubt I’ll have much more play time today, but will continue making these brief updates as time allows.

Had a few login/logout cycles, but not much happening – I’ve overpriced some salvage, and in an effort to pick up some sales badges I’ve lowballed a lot of cheap tech salvage and am waiting to turn it over – probably for a loss, but I’m looking to the invention slot benefits, not influence.  HM has just under half a million in influence held either in bids or in sales I’m waiting to go through.

Since I’ve proven fairly well at this point, I think, that ANYONE can earn influence on the market, having done so with 4 salvage slots and a mere 2 transaction slots, I have started to level HM.  He is level 5 now, and will get one more level to open up 3 more recipe slots, giving him a total of 4 places to hold recipes.  Once I have done this, I will begin working on the field crafter badge, focusing particularly on Endurance Modification IOs early on for the easy profit those give.  I’ll try to get some screenshots and more details up on where HM stands in the next day or two.

3 thoughts on “The Heroic Marketeer”

  1. Hi,

    I did a similar thing a while ago with a lvl 1. One other way I made myself some money was buying cheap lvl50 SOs and vendoring them to the store. You have 10 Enhancement slots you could fill quite quickly with a trawl through the SOs for sale in the market. Not sure if that strategy still bears fruit. Just remember not to try it with IOs, which you can’t sell.

    Cheers,
    Conker

  2. Hey. Re: Conker’s post on buying and vendoring level 50 SO’s, I did this a couple weeks back when starting a new corruptor on a new server where I didn’t know anyone. I made my first million in about an hour of running back and forth. I found it pretty easy to purchase SOs at levels 48-52 for about 5k each, reselling them to the appropriate vendor for ~20k. Remember that SOs whose levels are divisible by 5 (50, 45, 40, etc) are worth more than the others.
    I sold the 2 big insps from outbreak which gave me starting cash to do this.
    Happy Marketeering!
    Mr. U

  3. Great tips thanks guys, typically i tend to farm to get my inf, but I tried these suggestion out and they work really well, obviously the technique can apply to items other than SO’s.

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