[G] The Key to Being a Poor Player.
Purpose;Credentials;Intro:
I decided to start this guide because I never found it in Angie or Leonheart’s threads and always found it one of the only things I held to be my forte in my time in Cabal. Retired from Cabal around the time of the OGP to EST switchover because of geographical location and IP blocking, I had several high level characters running around Venus, spending most of my time on my FS doing random, wasteful things like running LiD at 160 and stuff like that. I’ve recently had a large amount of nostalgia and decided to prowl some forums, and motivated me to begin.
First off I’d like to say that I was never an intense gamer and I was never rich in the game. I hear most people complaining they lack alz for what they want and I personally admit to having had these same feelings. Sharing with you now are the ways I overcame this.
Note: If impatient, skip to Step4 for a condensed, technical version, I won’t be posting a TL;DR.
For many of you, this MAY be obvious knowledge, for those of you that don't, that's what this is here for.
TheTrap:
It starts off like this: lust. You just must have that weapon. You see that perfect helm; you absolutely need that costume. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you just want it so bad you can’t think of anything else. Anything and everything runs through your mind. The depths of desire are so bad, you cringe every time you think about it, maybe once every 5-6 seconds. The anxiety of knowing that maybe in the next second, it’ll be gone, but you just don’t have the finances to do so.
Many people fail right here. Alzbuying is what happens and then you’ve fallen into this neverending trap cycle like cheap cigarettes and/or whatever you’re addicted to. And here’s how you satisfy what you want, get what you want, 100% legit and proud of it.
Me, myself, I’m a costume whore, and I think I spent on average 50-100m each week on something visual related. How, Where, What? Find out.
Step1 – Acceptance
Accept you are poor. Quite frankly, it’s very necessary. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and recognize there is something that you want, badly. Don’t let it consume you. Idleness and busy-ness will both get you into trouble, and when you’re desperate you make some pretty stupid decisions. Open your eyes, get up, and go to the fridge/pantry. Have a coke, crack open a beer (if you’re of age, seriously), have that chocolate bar you’ve been resisting for a few days. When you’re ready, sit back down and have a good look at your resources, which leads us to…
Step2 – Asset Management
We’re talking about resources here. I’m not going to cover anything real-life here, if you want to spend money to buy cash-items and sell them for alz, that’s great, but I refuse to teach people how to spend their money. What resources, other than your money, or your parents money, do you really have?
a) Time.
b) Effort.
c) Alz.
The key is balancing these three basic resources. However, there are intelligent ways to spend your time and intelligent ways to spend your effort, and also intelligent ways to spend your alz.
To cover asset management, there’s a simple strategy that I like to distinguish with your alz as your CashFlow or PettyCash and your Stockpile or Bank. This, essentially, is vital. How you split it is up to you. I did a 50-50 split, keeping half as inventory and half in my warehouse as the Bank. The alz that I have on hand is alz I use to invest, and make money, whereas the alz in the bank is like a savings account, one that is only dug open in cases of emergency. Whatever your emergencies may be.
Step3 – NoPainNoGain
While this is true, I like to look at it more like “No Investment Without a Principal has a Return”. If you don’t invest one thing, you won’t get any results. Figure out what is most important to you, and be ready to sacrifice the rest. Enough said.
Step4 – Invest!
Here’s where it becomes interesting. I will be focusing on investing Time to turn it into Alz, since that’s what I did, but if you would like to know the other methods feel free to PM me.
Note how there are 6 character slots in your login page? Fill them if you haven’t already. While some can say this is ESTsoft encouraging you to test out every class, I see this as incentive to make money. Here we go. Note that you can do this with your main at any phase, disregarding where you are in your leveling process. I like to do this with mules as it gives me a chance to look at a new character and test out those things I want to do.
Now that you have that done, instantly you have acquired extra storage space. Not a bad bonus, but not the real reason for making these extra characters. Personally I prefer ranged units for this, so WI and FA are the best choices, but its quite inconsequential as spawns are relatively close together.
Quest to level 40. Do minimum grinding and simply fulfill quests for their rewards. Only buy basic skills and ones that will make your leveling easier, but don’t overcommit. This is a huge time sink. HUGE. You’ll muster some alz, but it won’t be overly good or bad. At level 35-40, stop doing quests, and simply grind, solo.
Here on out, you’ll be farming like mad. Apes and the like, your goal is aramid/shadowsteel. Crush each and every single one of these. Use your main, use a friend, use your guild. Offer a premium to those who help you out, and remember to pay it forward when you receive. Do not turn in any quests. You will find yourself leveling much, much slower.
When you hit 50, switch to PortLux immediately and grab your transmuter so you can crush yourself. By now, you should have at least 5-6 stacks of Shadowsteel and Aramid, and about 2-3 stacks of Citrine cores. Sell the cores you don’t need, they fetch an alright price, burn the rest crafting. An early head start to your crafting is very important to securing the basis of your CashFlow/PettyCash.
You want to rush until you can make Adept. This stuff sells no matter what. Even if people don’t need it, they’ll go, hey, why the hell not. You’ll find you have competition, but when you get those lucky crafts, they sell fast and hot. Put everything +3 and +4 skill up for sale, crush +1 and +2 to craft again.
The key here is a fast turn-over time. You’re already spending much time farming, any time you’re away from your computer you should set up a shop even with stuff in the AuctionHouse. The more you can sell in a shorter amount of time, the better. Even if this means compromising your prices by maybe 20%, it’s the time resource we don’t have an infinite of since that’s what we’re investing.
I’ll note here that medium grade stuff sells the fastest. Nobody needs to buy low level equipment, and high-level stuff is too expensive and more rare. The middle’s where the money’s at and the crafting system makes this happen.
Once you can start hitting Stone Golems or Hounds or things that drop Titanium level drops all the time (instead of bluestin), you’re going to want to do that. The fastest way to level is to do dungeons, but since you would like to make money, you’re going to avoid them for now.
Stockpile disks, crafting cartridges, and any single-slotted titanium you find, FCMs/UCMs. Crush normal equipment for the cores, this is for saving space and having a more efficient farm run. Sell these in any downtime you have. Use the auction House to find prices and undercut constantly. Sell, sell, and sell. The less time you invest for the most return in alz is always the better investment.
Here I’d like to say that single-slotted titanium is extremely valuable because these are required for crafting. Back in my day these use to go for 500k easily, more often than not more than that. These you don’t want to undercut; somebody will buy them – almost-always regardless of the price. This, until about lvl 75, will be your main source of income.
Do not push crafting any more. This is too large of an alz sink that you cannot afford now and will result in extremely devastating CashFlow results. Sell lvl2 crafting items and materials, and even NPC the titanium cores for quick and instant cash most people aren’t willing to pay for.
By level 75 on a single character you will have at least a reasonable amount of alz. On one character when I did this, I was sitting at about 200m with the prices of single slotted titanium being 500k a pop. It’s not that much money in hindsight, but this initial investment proves to be extremely valuable in the future. I amazed myself since prior to this, I thought 10m was an amount I would never achieve.
Remember at lvl 65, there was this dungeon, called the Lake in Dusk that I specifically told you to ignore? Well now, at level 75, we’re going to go in. Why wait 10 levels? Again, this is a time-related investment. Since we decided to invest time, we aren’t going to focus on leveling fast, or anything like that. We’re focusing on our income, since this is our alternate character anyway. LiD is about to become your main source of income.
Now that you have a reasonable amount of cash, take half that and stockpile LiD maps that are up to a certain price. As an example, they were around 300k each when I bought them en-masse, and I would buy any and all maps until 350k each. Run them all as quickly as possible, but lure the immediate mobs around each of the bosses and hit them together. You’ll do this because while bosses can often drop you UCM’s normal mobs can sometimes, sometimes drop you UCH. As much as this doesn’t make much sense, its true, and you won’t want to miss out on the one time you do. They’ll also drop you slotted titanium, which you should be very familiar with their advantages by now. Crush any shadow-titanium, as sexy as it looks, and run the dungeon multiple times before returning to town. Check any Ziggy drops for Amp’d S.Tit, SEMs, and other rare drops. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Sell cores and anything valuable you can find.
Personally, I find Ruina Station useless for drop except for leveling, but I know people who have gotten very lucky osmium amp drops in RS and feel free to farm if you’d like. Using the same theory, you want to jump into EoD at lvl 90 right away. Why? At least back in my day, selling slotted Osmium equipment to the NPC often doubled or tripled the cost of the EoD; you could comfortably make 1m and sometimes close to 2m even before you sell any UCH, each run. If you run out of space always trade 1 suit for 2 slotted osm equiments in your inventory, 140k vs 107k. Again, sell cores, and check any and all drops for amp in them.
With this constant farming method, you are able to make a very steady income even without any lucky drops. Carry this forward to VolcanicCitadel at level 140 (when you can solo it fairly quickly). The stockpile of Alz you built up earlier will begin to multiply exponentially.
Split your cash pile in half frequently. Only spend from your Bank for things like Equipment and Costumes that you like, but never touch your CashFlow for things other than buying and stockpile dungeon entries. Thus, your income is steady, so long as you have the time to invest into it.
Step5 – Enjoy!
Not much to say here. Gloat, brag, whatever you’d like to do. Sharing is caring, though. Hope this helps anybody out there who was patient enough to read this and carry it out.
