[october 2009 updates in purple]1/ First step : stall your drops(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.)
First, this will earn you more money than selling them to NPCs.
When selling drops to NPCs you get barely 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 that 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 invaluable asset? 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 understanding 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 which you start seeing once you have gold and time on your hands, items are way more expensive but also of a 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 the 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 they 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 gameplay and by the money you are earning through this gameplay. It's largely psychological.
It teaches you that even by playing humbly your lowbie character, without buying stuff to resell 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 3 to 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 to 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 highAlright 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, even. 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. It's an obvious idea as 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 protection 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 most realize. 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 underpriced as well as jumping on 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 of 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 your 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.
3/ Refrain from buying stuff for your charSounds 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.
[october 2009 update : Well I haven't tamed that inner greedy pokemon:) It has tamed me. I buy plenty of starry stuff for my chars and my cash pile rarely goes over 300m (I'm lvl 48). I'm content with it but my moneymaking skill has stopped progressing since a year or two, about the time I wrote this guide. Very recently I've experimented with great profit with something I have heard about since a few years already but had never tried out seriously. It works very well. I won't tell what it is though. [[This trick is obsolete since the elements overhaul.]] But I wanted to say here that I'm not a good moneymaker, I'm merely good enough to give a kick start to people who don't know anything about the job.]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 can't, you won't 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 for a few exceptions, look around.
So they live miserable lives on both counts : cash and human relationships.
[october 2009 update : The real obstacle to learning moneymaking as I have found out is the willingness to face own's own shortcomings and to take the necessary steps to learn past these shortcomings. It is therefore not a matter of applying a technique but a dialogue between oneself and oneself. There are feelings involved that block us from progressing and it is these feelings that we must be willing to face. We need to come to accept and love ourselves through the expression of these feelings in order to let go of them and be able to learn beyond our sticky points.
I'm sure this applies to other skills as well:)
I knew that already when I wrote this guide but had never included it in my writing although I knew it is the main thing to learn. It just seemed too intimate and introspective to include it on this board but I've regretted many times over the years not having written it down. It IS the thing to go through. The rest is accessory.]B/ Ethical concernsWhen 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.
[october 2009 update : I'm a big believer in karma (i.e. 'the working of the law of cause and effect on all planes of existence') so I try to do unto others what I would want to be done unto me. For example, if I get my hands on an obviously mistakenly underpriced item (like it's exactly 10 times less than its normal value, suggesting a mistyping at pricing) I will contact the seller and offer him to buy the item back. Of course if it's a very valuable item, or worse a critically important one (like my current main weapon in sosun quality) it may take some effort to do it. To tell you the truth, I was happy the incredibly underpriced sun xbow I found recently was in the stall network so that I didnt know who got ripped off:)) My point is though, ethics are important and each one decides which manners of ethics he will include in his practice. You don't have to be ruthless, not even a little : you can do business and remain perfectly fair. I'm not perfectly fair. I'm not advocating one way or the other. I'm just saying that it was easier to be fair when I was a total newbie.]One last fun note: GRAB YOUR GOLDHow 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 MOBs 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.
. You didnt have to make a paragragh about picking up you gold, and then tell me that it was about me 
asshole 
