CoX: Three-Star Dave’s Simplistic Guide to Making Easy Money …. er, Influence

So I resisted the whole Auction House thing for a long time as a horrible time sink, coupled with general irk at the high prices of all the funkadelic invention sets.

Well, some gentle guidance from Margie, plus a few useful guides, has got me doing at least some of this. I still don’t like going through elaborate IO set planning and purchasing (pricing remains irksome, and the whole mix-and-match ingredients and influence and recipes and geographic hopping about and the crappy interface make it tiresome). But I am spending some chunks of time with characters at the Auction Houses dealing with all the salvage and recipes that do show up in my tray, which means I might as well make some use of the time to make some added money.

Note: This is all purely optional. As far as I can tell, you can live a long, happy, fulfilling life as a hero or villain simply selling all the salvage and recipes you get at any local store and taking the money to buy the normal TO/DO/SO stuff. But I find it weighs on my mind, though, that I might be selling something for 250 that is on the market for 12,000 (or analogous higher stakes stuff). As long as the store prices are out of whack with the auction prices, it will bug me — but it will also provide the basis for what follows.

At any rate — this is what I’m doing these days. Non-obligatory, and only as much as I want to do.

Making easy money 

The following procedure can be done by anyone with minimal time (or as much time as you want to sink into it).

Much of this is predicated on the proposition that many players are lazy. Or, rather, they have better things to do with their time than figure out the prices of what they are putting things up for bid, or to run off to a store to sell stuff there. Whic,h, if yiou look at the pricing on Invention Salvage, opens up doors for profit (if not fun):

1. White (common) invention salvage sells for 250 at the store. You can find white invention salvage for action for 10-50. Net profit: 200 each.
2. Yellow (uncommon) sells for 1,000 at the store. You can easily buy gobs of it for 200-500. Net profit: 500 each.
3. Orange (uncommon) sells for 5,000 at the store. Some uncommon can often be found for 1,000-2,000. Net profit: 3,000 each.

The math is pretty simple. Buy low, sell high. The risk is zero — you don’t pay for what you don’t get. 

(Is this “farming”? It’s certainly “gaming the system” — but no more than anyone on Wall Street does it. If the Devs wanted, they could set the store price for anything as a dynamic calculation of the running average of sale prices over the last three weeks — which would then stabilize prices immediately and stop the speculation. Alternately, they could do the same thing with a 10% discount, so as to encourage a bit of trading. They don’t, so there it is.)

The “good” things to buy aren’t always the same, as the market ebbs and flows. It’s a matter of running through the Invention Salvage list, starting at the top of the color you can afford to buy in lots of 10, and seeing where the current bargains seem to be In general, the bargains will be better for tech salvage than arcane, and for stuff toward the top of each list rather than stuff at the bottom (though see below).

Once you buy something cheap, pick it up and zip over to the closest store to sell it dear. Ch-ching. Return to the auction house, rinse, repeat for as long as you have time or interest. Pick up some pocket change, or grind out a small fortune. The decision is yours.

In some cases, you’ll start immediately seeing purchases being made In other cases, they may be slower. But sale prices are like a bell curve — almost any price will eventually come back around again. If you can, be patient — come back to it tomorrow. If you run a lot of alts, this works great, as it may be a few days (or more) before you come back. Things will eventually be buyable at that price, unless it’s utterly absurd.

Which brings up another lesson, if you’re following this advice: leave your money working for you. Having 50,000 influence burning a hole in your pocket when you sign out isn’t doing you any good. Having that 50,000 bidding for stuff while you sleep means you’ll get something for it when you get back on.

As an aside, I have a chat window tab that just has Consignment House dialog. That lets me monitor what’s up with my bids while I’m off doing Real Hero Work.

Making the big bucks 

The above scenarios — playing low sellers against the fixed buyer (store) price — is perfectly safe and easy. But the big money (which you’ll eventually want and need) comes with speculation — buying low and hopefully selling high(er), which does have risks (and is a bit less easy). There’s two ways of doing this:

1. Look for Invention Salvage that has an array of prices in the history, low and high. Bid for some at the low price, then sell it at the higher. You’ll take a bit of a hit from the Consignment House’s fee (i.e., it takes money to make money, The risk is that the market will change, and what you just bought for 10,001 is all of a sudden selling for 6,000. Plus, if you pull stuff off the market and set it at a lower price, you have to pay the CH fee again. That said, there’s a big possibility for big money here — some Invention Salvage goes for millions — which means making a few percent can mean a substantial profit.
2. Make a lowball bid. Something selling pretty regularly for 25,000? Put in a bid for 15,001. There might be some lower offerings out there (see “people are lazy” above), or there might be again soon. It’s like Christmas in April when this sort of thing comes through. You can go even lower, but remember you’re out on the fringes of the bell curve the lower you go. Then, once bought, sell it for the “normal” price you’ve been seeing. Same risks apply as above — and realize that once someone (yoiu) have bought something for 15,001, following bidders will come in at that level for a while, which makes selling it for 25,000 a scosh tougher. Assuming that price wasn’t an anomoly, however (sometimes a big assumption), the price should eventually go back up.

Both of the above apply to anything for sale — not just salvage, but recipes, crafted enhancements, normal enhancements, etc. It also holds true both for playing the market and just plain ol’ buying stuff that you want — if you have the time to wait on a lowball bid for that one ingredient you need for that recipe you reeeeaaly want to build.

One thing to consider if you get a great bargain price on something (or have it drop on you for free during a mission) — you might want to sock it away into the Vault, so that you have it on hand for some future invention you want to build. On the plus side, a future effort might be quicker, easier, and much cheaper. On the down side, you’ve now locked that “money” away where it isn’t doing anything for you. It’s also one more thing to remember and place to visit (“Wait, do I have one of those in the Vault?”).

A note on pricing: When buying, always add a little to the current asking price. If things are selling for 200, bid 201. You’ll win the bidding sooner, for a trivial incremental cost. If things are selling for 20,000, sell it for 19,999 — yours will be the cheaper price, and so be bought sooner. You can also do some other incremental price increases, if you’re relatively flush — 211 instead of 200, or 18,999 instead of 20,000. The opportunity cost of time makes it worthwhile.

As another aside — check out the “Buying/Selling” numbers. High buyers vs low sellers (a seller’s market)  makes it less likely a lowball bid is going to work. Low buyers vs high sellers is a much better situation. Conversely, low buyers vs high sellers also makes it more difficult to auction off something for a high(er) price.

Which raises an interesting issue. In theory, you could also make money by offering up stuff for higher than the current asking price. And sometimes that works — Captain Money-Pants is filthy rich and really wants that Human Blood Sample and so bids 5,000 for its so that he doesn’t have to wait. (Sometimes it works when people key in an extra zero, too.) But, in general, people will tend to bid around current asking prices. Conversely, sellers, unless they have lots of time or are speculating themselves, tend to set a low price, too, since they want it to move. It’s easier to buy cheap and sell at the going rate than to buy at the going rate and sell expensive. I’m all about the easy.

Places 

If all you are doing is buying and selling stuff on the market, all you need is a Consignment House and a nearby store (or known contact). Atlas isn’t bad as you’re running back and forth between the Hollows and Kings Row, and Kings Row is much better now that (huzzah!) there are vendors up on the plaza by Blue Shield. Steel Canyon and Talos are both excellent for this sort of thing, as they have both contacts next to the Consignment House and they have easily reachable stores (esp. with travel powers). Similarly, the Black Market in Sharkhead and Cap Au Diable both have available vendors to turn around those cheap purchases.

If you’re doing actual inventing in this cycle, things get a little more annoying, unless you have a base with workbenches for crafting. Steel Canyon remains excellent (as the University is across the street from the Consignment House, albeit over a cliff). The Black Market in Cap Au has a University nearby (albeit with some danger to get to and from at lower levels); the lack of public education in the Rogue Islands, though, takes its toll here. Talos is more problematic, though it has a base portal nearby and a train station to Founders which — if you can fly high — isn’t too bad to get to the Uni (you can also fly back to Steel’s campus, but that’s annoying).

Summing up 

I spend more time doing this sort of thing than I used to — and it’s easy for it to become an end on its own (“I have X money now — but if I reinvest it, then tomorrow I’ll have Y money –” and meanwhile our enhancements turn yellow and red with neglect). The most important things to remember about the whole auctioning and crafting thing:

1. You don’t have to do it.
2. You don’t have to do it any more than you want to.
3. You don’t have to do it at all if you don’t want to.

But if you do want to do it — the above techniques are working pretty well for me.