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 Post subject: [GUIDE] Money making guide [Truie] (buying/reselling)
PostPosted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 10:11 pm 
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1/ First step : stall your drops

First, this will earn you more money than selling them to NPC's.

(A "drop" is an item that falls from a "mob" when it dies. A "mob" is a "monster". A "NPC" is a non-playing character, here a merchant like the blacksmith or the alchemist.)
When selling drops to NPC's, you barely get enough gold to buy potions and NPC gear for your character. Many people play that way and whine about being poor.

Second, you will learn prices. Learning prices is the hard limit to moneymaking. I mean once you know prices, you can buy and resell. If you don't, you cant. And it's very hard to learn prices. You learn some prices because your character is playing at this level range and with this type of items. I've been playing the market for 6 months on Venus and I still don't know shit about prices way above my level range. Can't learn. Would take huge work. I wouldn't even know where to start.
So, value your prices' knowledge. It is your best asset.
And how do you get this? Simply by... stalling your drops. And of course by browsing stalls. But browsing stalls isn't enough, at all. Otherwise I would know all the prices in SRO.

OK you've stalled your drops for a while and you've come to learn a few prices. How did you do this, well you've first tried a certain price range for a certain type of item, you saw in how much time it sold if at all. You adapted your price to that selling-time and in a few tries you learned the price for that type of stuff.
But there is a catch here.. a little secret :



1bis/ Have a big gap

(those who don't know what a "gap" means will find a short definition at the bottom of this guide)

Having a gap means you will level up very slowly, up to about 9 times slower than with no gap at all at low level. When you level that slowly, you grab much gold and drops from your hunting and you gather therefore much gold to buy your equipment with.
Suddenly it's like magic, you have 300K for that sword that you thought was outrageously expensive before. And that's where it matters in this guide : you start seeing prices differently. You start to understand the hidden side of the market as well.
It's as if there were two markets : an apparent market for people who don't have much gold and don't know how to make gold. The prices are low, and the items suck.
The hidden market is different : in this market that you start to see once you have gold and time on your hands, items are way more expensive but also of much better quality.
Why am I making a weird story out of this? Because this is really how it happens in your head when you start having a big gap and studying the market a little.
How can there be these "two markets"? Simple. People who play on the easy market will buy low whatever they find, sell low whatever they have and be bewildered at the high prices of pro stallers, wondering whoever buys such junk... thinking it may be gold buyers or something.
Well, no. Just have a big gap, you'll have much more gold and you'll be able to buy that stuff that used to look way too expensive to you AND you'll start pricing your own stuff that high, just as high as you would be willing to buy it for.

I'm not talking about SOX stuff here. I'm talking about your +1 +2 +3 weapons, or your +3STR or +3INT protections. Suddenly paying tenths or hundreds of thousands of gold pieces for these seems not only doable, but a good opportunity. Suddenly you start understanding that the people who price these items low just don't have enough gold to imagine that other players do have enough gold yet got this gold without even buying-reselling.

See the magic? The secret?
You wouldn't price a sword 300K that you wouldn't buy for yourself for over 50K, would you?
Now, if you'd be ready to pay 300K for that sword with money earned from killing monsters only, why would you sell it any lower?
You start imagining that other people like you have enough gold to buy stuff even in the lower levels in the noob town, even just from the gold they grabbed and the drops they sold at low prices.
And yes, they do. And they jump on the good deals. And the other people rarely see these good deals. And if they see them, they can't afford them.

So having a big gap is kinda essential to start learning moneymaking.
It teaches you that the market you see may not be all the market there is.
It teaches you that your idea of prices is conditioned by your game-play and by the money you earn through this game-play. It's largely psychological.
It teaches you that even by playing humbly your lowbie character, without buying stuff to resell it but just by grabbing your gold and selling your drops at normal prices in your stall, you can have much more gold than most people. And you can therefore buy good stuff. And you can price your own junk just as high as you'd be willing to buy it if you needed it. And it's at a way way higher price. Like 5 times higher.

And another positive side of having a big gap is that you'll spend so much more time on a given level that you'll have plenty of time to browse the market and find rare and good items for your character.

Playing on hard-mode (gap 9) was a determining step in my learning how to make money in SRO, and I suspect it played an important part in many moneymakers stories as well.


2/ Buy low sell high

Alright you've learned some prices, you've earned some gold, now it's time to start buying to resell. It happens naturally by the way. Once you've stalled a certain type of item and you suddenly see it being sold way too cheap in somebody else's stall, you grab it and reprice it in your own stall... at the higher price you know it will sell for without problem.
I started with +3STR protections and accessories. I had a STR chinese char and of course +3STR stuff was the shit because my character was so much better with it. I realized I was ready to pay much more for a +3STR piece of clothes than for a normal one. Much more than for a lvl+3 one, for example. To give you an idea, say a blank pair of gloves was worth 5K, i would be ready to pay 30 to 50K for one that would be +3STR. And then I would start seeing in other people's stalls that they didn't know this. At all. They would price the +3STR items just like if it had no such bonus. Or maybe twice its price, whereas it was worth 10 times its price, not 2 times.
So... that's when I started buying to resell. Sounds obvious, and I'm feeling like I'm being silly explaining this in details, but I've come to see that there really are overall few people who ever buy to resell.

After +3STAT gear I went on to weapons. Easy tip, weapons are what people are most ready to spend all their cash on. Weapons are what sells the easiest. I also took a good look at accessories. Did you notice how they're much harder to find than protections? That's of course because accessories fit all characters, whereas protections fit only 1 in 6 types of characters (2 genders and 3 protections types). On the same note, female protections are way easier to find than male ones because most characters are male. So you can price male protections higher than female ones.
I realized that if accessories were so hard to find, therefore they should be priced higher. Now if you get your hands on an accessory that has +1 +2 or +3 STR or INT... think well before you price it. These are, I swear, way rarer and harder to find than you imagine. I find them very rarely for sale at the price they deserve : that is the price at which they will sell no more quickly than the rest of your stall's stuff. It IS high.
From then on, by collecting +# weapons and reselling them I was soon able to buy some lowbie SOS that were under-priced as well as any good deal that passed my way and wasn't too expensive.

Soon appeared the two components of buying-reselling : the time to sell, and the benefit.
Each slot of your stall is money. Earning a certain percentage or margin isn't enough of course, you need to make a minimum amount in benefit for it to deserve a slot.
In practice I like selling lowbie gear to help people out, but when I want business I'd rather NPC these items than waste a slot that could be used to earn much more.
The time is critical and that's where I still have much to learn. You got to have high prices on you valuable items for sale but not too high or you will sell too slowly and end up therefore earning less. Because once you sold some stuff you can buy some more to sell it again.
Good stallers (BTW it's by watching and talking with these people that I got the desire and will to start doing the same myself) know how to price their items just right, making a good profit and selling quickly. I'm a lazy and greedy staller who will accept seeing an expensive item remaining in his stall for a week... or even more for some stuff that is very expensive to me. But I know that my prices are too high usually.





3/ Refrain from buying stuff for your char

Sounds easy? It may be the hardest part.
Don't feed your hungry little inner monster who wants über stuff.
When you see über stuff that you need, buy it if it is way below average market price... TO RESELL IT RIGHT AWAY.
Train yourself to do this.
If you can't tame that inner greedy pokemon you won't ever build cash and won't ever earn enough money to buy this same good stuff with... once you really can afford it.
Because do not think that you can afford it when you have enough cash to buy it, oh no no no...
You can afford it only when buying it won't lower your investment-cash in a significative way.
Yes, your cash-pile is your investment cash now. It is no longer your candy-buying spending cash-pile anymore. Get used to it and this pile of cash will grow high.






Appendices:

A/ The necessary qualities to be a SRO moneymaker:


Rely on yourself, don't beg, don't whine, don't ask, don't plead, don't seduce into giving you free shit.
Be a badass autonomous bastard.
If you cant, you wont earn money.
You'll be given freebies and live a whore life, most probably a poor whore life.
But I'd rather have a new char on a new server and start earning than be a high lvl whore full of junk given to me by "friends".

It is WAY FUNNIER.
And more rewarding.
And you feel good about yourself being able to get money from the market.

And by the way... beggars are poor except a few exceptions, look around.
So they live miserable lives on both counts : cash and human relationships.




B/ Ethical concerns

When I started playing SRO I never overpriced and when I found an under-priced item I would warn its owner or would buy the item and sell it back to its owner at same price once they went back on.
I even used to price my junk very low, hoping that others would do the same and we could thus all share the good items that we found and all benefit from this fair-market policy. And it worked!

How time has passed... ;-)
These were the beginnings of SRO and things have changed, the game isn't new anymore and the overall morals have hardened quite a bit.

Now I'm a lowlife bastard greedy cut-purse who will jump on any great deal without a thought for the poor sob who got his item bought for a half or even for a tenth of its real value.
So... if you want to make money while still being compassionate, this guide isn't for you I'm afraid. I haven't raised that skill.

Yet I do have ethics in my practice, for example I won't try to haggle (talking to a seller to make him lower his price) unless if the item is really overpriced and it is much gold for me.






One last fun note: GRAB YOUR GOLD

How many poor whiners don't even do this?
You whine about you being poor, but when you're seeing a big pile of gold on the ground you're too lazy to grab it?
What sense does this make?
I'm surprised at how many people don't grab their gold in low level parties even when they're poor !
I still grab my gold although it's of very little relevance to my finances. I like grabbing gold. Don't you? Maybe you're not made for earning money.

Yeah, when you have learned to make money the gold you grab and the drops you get from MOB's don't matter. They earn you so little compared to what you earn from buying-reselling that they're like entertainment. Still, I always enjoy grabbing a pile of gold. Free money!





Definition of "gap"

Gap: the difference between your character's level and the level of your highest skill mastery.
The higher the gap (up to a limit of 9), the more skill points experience you get when you kill a MOB and the less experience points you get. This is the key to Skill-Points Farming, a topic about which many guides have been written.


Last edited by Truie on Sat Jul 05, 2008 1:01 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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