Little intro:People sometimes complain about marketplace, saying it's full of unfair offers and that it gives too much money to those who abuse it. But if that happens, it's because of the lack of competition between traders. My point is that if we all start using marketplace more actively and create some competition, it will fix the prices and make the market a better place overall, even for new players. Here I will try to explain why marketplace can be a good income source and how to use it this way.
This guide contains some basic info along with advanced tips and suggestions for getting profit.
If you are an experienced player and know how the marketplace works, go straight to the Part 2.First, a small list of wordings I'm going to use:
Loom - a loomed item, usually +3.
Lp, lps - loompoints.
Scamming - making a good deal.
Bullshit offer - an offer that is unlikely to get accepted.
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*note that sometimes even a bullshit offer becomes a successful scamming.Part 1. What marketplace is.
Marketplace menu consists of:
1.
Statistics. This contains:
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Most offered loomsBasically what people want to get rid of most. Maybe just a shitty loom or a recently-nerfed weapon, or maybe just an item that is popular and therefore cheap. This list isn't too useful for trading.
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Most requested loomsWhat are the most demanded and therefore expensive items. Note that cRPG market isn't huge, so this list is quite flexible. However you will notice some looms stay there for a long time, meaning they are really good and rare (rare compared to their effectiveness). Very useful list for estimating the price of some looms when making your offers.
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Average loom pricesWith the lack of any transfer system between different players, all the transfers are made through the trades like "1 gold for +3 item" which totally fucks up the whole statistics here, so it doesn't show you the real picture. Pretty useless info.
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Recent transactionsShows all the trades (including auctions) made over the last 24h. Since those are the trades that are already accepted, it's pretty useful for analysing the prices. For example, you can see how much gold people pay for a loompoint, or how much some item is worth. Check it sometimes.
2.
Offers. It's the list of offers you made. Here you can add a trade/auction offer, delete your offers or change your booth sign and booth message (last two are only shown on your booth page).
Offers you made last for a week, after that you have to make it again for a fee of 100 gold.
Note that for any gold involved in your offers you pay a 5% fee.
3.
Auctions. Auctions are a poor way to make profit, you should only use it for buying stuff, like large booths or banners for your clan etc.
However a few words about how the bidding works.
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Trades. The list of all active trade offers, use the filters to find what you want. The trades you can accept are colored in green.
If you click on the name of offered item, it will show you the trades requesting this item. If you click on the name of requested item, it will show you the trades offering this item.
5.
Booths.It's the list of the "Large booth" owners and their offers. It can be bought through the auctions made automatically by the system, so that there are always 5 to 7 active large booths. It allows you to have maximum 50 active offers (regular amount is 25) and removes the 5% fee on your offers.
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loginSo how does marketplace work in general and why we can make profit here?
All the trade offers on the marketplace can be divided on two groups:
1) "Wishful" - by people who want some specific item for their build or for style purposes. Or they sell something to get the money for something else.
When they buy, they are ready to pay a lot to get what they want fast. When they sell, they accept low payment to get the money fast.
2) "Calculating" - by people who don't care much about what specific item to buy/sell, usually min-maxers or merchants. If they need an item, they just want to get some with decent stats, no matter what exactly - therefore they are not ready to pay a lot. When they sell, they want to get more money and are patient enough to wait till the successful trade comes.
You mainly get gold by making your own offers, not by accepting others.
Of course, sometimes you meet a good offer and make sure to accept it, but that happens rarely.
To make profit, you want to buy and sell to wishful traders, as well as avoid and bear the competition of calculating ones. The difference between the amount of gold people are ready to pay for something is significant. Why?
People are lazy. Here's one example: one day I bought an Iron Staff and then next day I sold it for 100k more. Why does it happen? If the first guy made an offer to sell his staff, or the second guy made an offer to buy this staff - they would just trade with each other directly without losing gold drained by me.
Part 2. Getting them moneyz.
1)
Buy a good loom -> Sell a good loomI guess the most popular way to make profit and the best for me so far. I have 2 alts, first of them offers loompoints for 1h and 2h looms, the second one - loompoints for polearm looms. Depending on how good a loom is (check the statistics and "most requested looms" page), I add from 0 to 100k gold to my loompoints. I also check the active offers involving that loom to make sure I offer more gold than any other trader.
So when any of my 50 offers get accepted, I transfer the looms to my main which has a Large booth and make two offers per loom: first requesting 2 lps + gold and second requesting gold only (ofc without a large booth I'd only request 2 lps + gold). I check the trades list again to make sure I demand less gold than anyone else, and here it goes. Sometimes the profit for buying a loom and then selling it goes up to 200k, but most often its 50-100k.
When trading, keep in mind it's much easier to buy/sell weapons than armour. People usually keep using their armour sets for a long time period, but they change their weapons much more often.
2)
Buy a shitty loom for cheap -> Trade it for a better one -> Trade it for a good loom -> Sell a good loom Somewhat longer and maybe less effective way but still can make a good amount of gold. People often have bad looms (like Hand Axe, Staff, Shortened military scythe etc) they want to get rid of. You can make an alt offering like "1 lpt + 200k for a loom" or "2 lps for a loom + 100k" for such bad looms. Then when you buy one, give it to another alt who'd have 25 offers of that loom for another loom of better quality. Repeat until you get a top-quality loom (takes 2-4 steps usually) and then sell it.
Note that some items can situationally be worth much more than they usually are. For example, a 2h ninja player is unlikely to buy any 2h weapon other than Katana, so he'd pay more than anyone else who doesn't need it for style. The examples of such items are: Donkey, Cudgel, Torch, Long Dagger, Practice Longsword, Studded Warclub (hello Molly), Flamberge, Stones, etc. They sometimes can be sold for a comparingly huge amount of gold if you're patient enough to wait for such occasion.
3)
Trade a good loom for a good loom + goldA simple way to trade which also allows you to often try different weapons.
Make a 3-5 offers per loom for a loom of same quality + 20k or 30k gold. For example, Knightly Arming Sword for Nordic Champion's Sword + 29k will get accepted quite fast.
4)
Trade loompoints (Large booth only)If you buy/sell loompoints without large booth, you lose like 15k per trade, so there's natural difference between how much gold people offer for a loompoint and how much gold people demand for a loompoint.
So without having to pay 5% fee you can offer best trades buying/selling loompoints while still getting profit about 20k for a buy-sell cycle. The only problem is that other Large Booth owners will often try to overbid you and it can get tiresome to either negotiate with them or overbid them all the time.
So that's the end, when I think of anything else I could add here, I'd make sure to do that.
Now I want to thank people who helped me with learning the ways of marketplace, in one way or another.
Tore, Jackie - for the inspiration they gave me.
ObiWan - for useful market advice.
Some of my jew ancestors - for something in my genes that helped me.
Chinese traders - for the competition they gave me.
OdE_Thorvic - for buying my Long Bardiche for 950k gold.
