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Guilds Will Hate You For Using this One Simple Trick to Get Rich!!


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1 minute ago, jodgi said:

I didn't make it abundantly clear, but I was thinking more of players who's main drive is OW PvP.

PvPers should be happier than anyone! Well, maybe not duelists but "PvPer" in the sense of people [like me] who just want to go out and wreck people and take their stuff.

I was driving around last night doing trading and thinking what an opportunity was being missed. Nobody at all hunting the waters.

I guess part of it is that it's still too early. Everyone is still getting situated. PvP like this is a commitment. With Fleet perks 1 & 2, you could make 2x Renoms (or whatever you like), 1x fir/fir Lynx, load up with repairs, sail to enemy territory, go to their free port and set up an outpost.

Now PvP with your Renoms (one at a time, so you have a spare durability back at your outpost) and hunt traders. Grab any traders you can, steal their ship (fleet perk!), put your warship in tow and use smuggler flag to go into the nearest port and just dump the goods for cash.

Whenever you're ready to go home, take the Lynx as your travel boat, as it will be nearly impossible for them to stop you even if they're camping the port.

With no teleport, it's a commitment but the more I think about it the more I think it will work and might make you a lot of money. I mean you could grab the right trader and blam, 250,000+ gold of trade goods on him even if you don't go to the ideal port to sell to.

 

The only people who are really in the cold are fight-until-we-sink duelists. If you want to be a duelist, you'll need to find a real source of income to back it up.

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29 minutes ago, jodgi said:

I've chosen to sell guns at fair rates casual players can afford so I'm probably gimping my inner capitalist. I get a little from that but not enough to keep up. The tiny fun I get from that is I'm ruining the price gouging frenzy of EVERY other seller in CS.

In before one of the rich traders uses his capital to buy all your stock of cheap cannons only to relist them at a higher price.

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18 minutes ago, Sansón Carrasco said:

In before one of the rich traders uses his capital to buy all your stock of cheap cannons only to relist them at a higher price.

Actually you should be happy when that happens.

You wanted to sell 20 guns at 2000 each.
It worked! You sold out. Who cares what happens to them? You got the price you asked for and should be happy.
Make 20 more guns and mark them up a bit.
Keep doing this until you stop selling out.

You will eventually reach a price point where demand slows down, the other guy isn't profiting by buying you out and now he's stuck with a load of guns he can't sell because you're still producing and incidentally undercutting him. He will have a hard time ever getting out from under his stockpile of guns that he ultimately overpaid for.


"Buyouts" really only work when supply is very limited.

I love how games like this are ultimately a lesson in real world economics.

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In theory, the rich trader (rich from other sources independent of the cannons in question) could continue to buy up Jodgi's cheap cannons and later rely on this stock to potentially sell them back below Jodgi's cannon crafting click price. If said rich trader had a deep enough stock of cannons, Jodgi might run out of money to buy mats and not want or be able to continue. Or he might start buying the rich trader's cannons instead of building his own.

I mean, in theory. I have read of similar tactics employed by players of this game, so it's not beyond the pale to consider it.

You're absolutely right, it does give some idea of real world economics.

Edited by Sansón Carrasco
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32 minutes ago, Slamz said:

Nobody at all hunting the waters.

I know some people who have been doing that exclusively since wipe. They're not idiots so fleeting up with Tlynxes or Tbrigs is obviously out of the question. If I was to do this I would set up to hunt fleet-pimp raiders ;) (Here timers and the universally loved revengegank feature rear their ugly heads, but not in this topic...). Taking risks is one thing, doing something incredibly stupid is another.

44 minutes ago, Slamz said:

I mean you could grab the right trader and blam, 250,000+ gold of trade goods on him

But you don't do that, do you? Instead you hunt the even more lucrative trade goods.

30 minutes ago, Sansón Carrasco said:

In before one of the rich traders uses his capital to buy all your stock of cheap cannons only to relist them at a higher price.

:)

I wouldn't give a single hello kitty.

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2 minutes ago, jodgi said:

But you don't do that, do you? Instead you hunt the even more lucrative trade goods.

I don't, but not for the reason you state.

I actually think piracy in the right area could be the best income in the game right now.

What holds ME back is that I am also an RvR player who needs to help with contention grinding and port flips. I can't really commit my time to build a pirate outpost in distant lands and live there for 3 days, with home waters (and therefore relevant homeland RvR activities) being a 3 hour sail away.

 

If I was a pure pirate I would absolutely already be out there, penetrating deeply into the enemy's most sensitive areas. Their poop deck would never recover. And I do think the income from sacking traders would more than offset my losses.

But as an RvR player I just can't commit to that kind of move right now.

It's not the economics guiding my decision. It's the logistics.

Are you trying this? Are you not finding traders or having a hard time sacking them and selling their goods? Genuinely curious if there is a reason this is not working.

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21 hours ago, koltes said:

The 1st step to fix the economy, which is absolutely crucial, is introduction of 3-4 Trade Hubs. This is so easy to do that it can be done in a hot fix. All that is that you could access shops of other trade hubs while being in one of them. Doesn't affect delivery. If I bought goods in TH #1 while being in TH#2 I still need to go there physically and pick them up. Linking 4 ports together should not be hard. This will allow your small nations to survive. This will allow players of all nations to interact in trading.
Who would sail to Talamanca just to check if some players sell anything there? No one. This area is dead. But people would sail and deliver trade goods and ships to those hubs because they are linked making it the largest market place.

These trade hubs also will sort issue of finding targets in the open world. There will be concentration of player activities

While I like the idea of trade hubs in principle,  I think in the games current state, this would make the current problem with the wealth being monopolized by a few an even bigger problem.  

This is based on my understanding that trade goods refresh during maintenance.  AI traders then move them around the rest of the day. It is the current reason the buying side of the trader is almost totally useless right now.    Unless your looking at the tool right after maintenance, its very likely that the tool is wrong on whats available in any port (Your trade hubs would fix this part of the problem).

However, it would also make it so you could buy out the high profit goods from all the surrounding ports from 1 spot, then move them at your leisure with a locked in higher margin per trip.   Then anyone logging in later is out of luck and while is forced into less profitable runs.   Large clans, or mega traders, would just keep a market alt int he trade hub (this would also likely lead to AH type bots that exist in most games), immediately buy up these items again as they are re-distributed by the AI.

I think a better solution would just be to have the trader tool update much more often (hourly maybe?)  with current inventories in ports.   It would serve the same purpose with letting people be able to see whats currently available in each location, without being able to manipulate it without being there.

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On 6/8/2017 at 10:45 AM, jodgi said:

Honest question:

Are you guys fine with fighting only players making pennies while traders live comfortably?

I'm NOT fine with that, and I've been saying from the start all the NPC ships (non mission) in the open world should produce massive rewards upon capture via the "Send to Admiralty" mechanic - so they don't ruin the ship crafter market.

Historically a captain received 3/8 of the total cost of a ship, the guns and stores, and any money seized. 

We're getting barely 1/20th right now. 

 

P.S. I love how the Trade Hub suggestion conveniently places one right next to Denmark, Sweden and French territories while being a long trip away from the Dutch. If you want to add trader hubs, you need to create some imaginary islands in more balanced locations. 

Edited by Tenet
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19 hours ago, Tenet said:

Historically a captain received 3/8 of the total cost of a ship, the guns and stores, and any money seized. 

We're getting barely 1/20th right now. 

Then again real captains captured maybe... 0.2-2 ships a year, while we can cap fourteen in a day, so...

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  • 1 month later...
On 7.6.2017 at 9:54 PM, Slamz said:

Enough people are having economic problems, and it took me a few days to get a leg up on it too, that I figured a small guide might be in order. This is not a complete guide but rather, an intro to the basic idea.

If you want fast (single login session) money (and ignoring PvP for the moment), you can:

* Kill enemy NPCs for basic PvE income.
* Open sea trading.

The first is a flat form of income. You can expect X gold per hour based on what you are doing and how fast you're doing it.

The second is a multiplier on your existing cash. This is important and this is what this (mini-)guide is about.

To this end, your first job is to establish "seed money". This is money you keep in reserve for trading. Let's say your seed money amount is 500,000 gold. If you want to buy something that costs 250,000, you need to build up to 750,000 gold before you buy it so that you do not dip into your seed money. Resist the temptation of spending your seed money. You'll see why:

Imagine there is a port that sells widgets for 1000. ("Widgets" is going to be some trade good. Violins. Pudding. Coffee. Etc.)
You open the trader tool (in the map, in the game) and look up widgets. You find another port that will buy them for 2000.

If you have 10,000 seed money you can buy 10 of them, make one trip and end up with 20,000.
If you have 500,000 seed money you can buy 500 of them, make one trip and end up with 1,000,000.

This is why it's important to keep a good amount of seed money on hand. Clawing your way up to a million starting with 10,000 is going to be slow and painful and you're better off just grinding NPCs. Clawing your way up to a million starting with 500,000 can potentially be done in one trading run. You want to go to that port that sells widgets and have the money to buy all of them.

 

Profits will still be capped by cargo space and how many widgets the port has for sale but you don't want to leave a port sadfaced with room in your cargo hold and widgets left behind in the port because you could not afford to buy them. So that's why you don't dip into your seed money, however tempting that may be.


Trade routes tend to be better the further away you get from populated areas. Everyone is doing this around your capital. They are buying trade goods up as fast as they appear and taking them away to sell, which hurts the value of the run and can mean you're scraping up the last 20 widgets when you had cargo space and money for 500 of them. What you want to find are the more out of the way areas where you can really load up. Try these steps:

1) Sail into some port.
2) Look at the trade goods for sale (trade goods, not resources)
3) Go to the trader tool in the map and search for them.
4) Does any nearby port have a "SELL [to NPC]" price that is higher than the "BUY [from NPC]" cost at this port? If so, there's your route.
5) Look some more. Is there ANY port ANYWHERE around here where you can buy this thing low and then anywhere else that you can sell to for high.

Like you see this port has coffee. They will sell it to you for 400. You look on the trade tool and the highest buy price is 350 so this is not a good trade. But looking closer, you see another port, not too far away, where your buy price is 200. Score! Go there, buy coffee, come back here and sell it.

Note that the trade tool is always out of date and the port may not have the item anymore but if the "A" column is marked then the port had the item at that price sometime in the near past and might have some now.

The more people who do this, the more it wrecks a particular trade run, which is why you want to spread out to do it.


But if you're wondering how everyone else is getting rich while you're still running missions in a Mercury trying to scrape your way back up to 50k gold, this is how they are doing it. With enough cargo space and enough money, you can potentially turn millions into many more millions, if you find the right stash of trade goods to scoop up.

 

Addendum:
Some ports consume crafted materials. Some of these items and ports are already tapped out but do look around for ports that may want to buy crafted materials from you. The price they pay may hugely exceed the click-cost to make the raws and assemble the item so make a bunch, load up and go sell em to the port. This is basically a way of converting labor hours to money, if you need the one more than the other.

P.S.
I wrote this guide knowing perfectly well that the more people who do it, the more they undermine my own profits, but I'm tired of people saying the economy is broken when it's not. Some people are filthy, mega-rich already and this sort of thing is how. Scraping coins together fighting NPCs is really only what you should do to get together basic seed money because you're broke (perhaps because some pirate sank your last trade run....)

P.P.S.
I write this guide so that you, dear reader, become rich and happy and totally not because I want to see a lot more fat traders on the high seas which I will absolutely demast, board and rob. And then keep the ship. And then maybe sell it on the market for even more money.

Please do not try to advise guys who already have many millions on their accounts:) And this is definitely not the way to be rich :)

Edited by Cortez
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2 hours ago, Cortez said:

Please do not try to advise guys who already have many millions on their accounts:) And this is definitely not the way to be rich :)

Do advise us, oh annointed one.

And it made me rich in record time. I am pretty curious what you think is more profitable than trade goods, though. I guess everyone else in the game is doing it wrong. You should write a guide.

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Buying low, selling high is exactly the type of trading that can get players on the open world in traders that aren't carrying super vital clan resources.

You want traders to hunt on the open world, but you don't want them to make money? You don't want there to be money in trading, because you don't enjoy trading?

I cannot comprehend how incredibly selfish you guys are.

HEY GUYS, BE ON OS SO I CAN KEEL YOU, BUT BE POOR TOO!

But one thing for sure, 500k on a single run, no matter what ship, seems to be a bit of a fairly tale on his end.

Edited by Quineloe
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  • 11 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/26/2017 at 10:41 PM, Quineloe said:

But one thing for sure, 500k on a single run, no matter what ship, seems to be a bit of a fairly tale on his end.

A single Indiaman filled with Versailles Terracotta (not even the most profitable AI trading good, by the way) will give you a NET PROFIT (assuming the usual 10% tax on buy and sell) of around 480k gold. Make that three Indiamen and you are close to 1.5 million in profit with around 500k spent to buy the stuff and 2 million made on selling it. No fairytale here. If you can find cheap Teak/White Oak/ Live Oak Logs (bought for less then 800) you can sell them in most capitals for more than 2000. with their minimal weight compared to trading goods, the can make you millions in a single run. If seen 30 million Wood trades get done with a single fleet.
(Also a sign of hoarding being a bit of a problem. The rich guys don't spend enough of their dime to keep things balanced. Then again, what is there to spend it on?)

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On 6/7/2017 at 6:03 PM, Remus said:

Because it means the amount of gold entering the server is skewed by a very few players.

Part of the reason for the wipe was a fresh start to control inflation. An ecxellent idea which has been widely accepted by the players. Many of us (not me personally, for reasons stated in my post) are now mired in povery, frightened to lose ships (I'll count myself in that category for now), unwilling to take risks, avoiding rather than embracing PvP, struggling to pay for ships and guns and finding even successful combat barely covers repair and crew costs.

Slamz has posted what all of us who make money do, but he has also highlighted its flaws. If I have 10k then I can make about 10k in a trade run; if I pick the goods and ports well it will take me half an hour in a basic cutter. All well and good. If I have 100k and am a little more careful in my choice of ports I can make 100k; perhaps not in half an hour, but my own preferred trade run takes about 45 minutes in a TBrig and whatever combat class 7 I happen to have. But if I have a million I can make another million; by now I may be restricted to trading between capitals just to be able to get the quantities and profits, but on Global Brits and Dutch have an informal alliance so you'll see Indiamen making the journey between KPR and Willemstad. I haven't tried to worlk out the value per trip but I expect for some players it's over a million, practically risk free since you won't get attacked at the 'enemy' port at the other end.

There is nothing wrong with this in itself. I have no objection to individual players making money; I like to make money myself. But you will - at least I hope you, the Game Labs team will - be looking at the bigger picture. To control inflation you need to balance money entering the server with money leaving. There has to be more money entering for reasons I won't go into here, but the difference should not be too great because that is what leads to inflation. From what I can see, the expenditure side isn't too bad. Sure it may need some tweaks here and there but I've no real complaints. But on the supply side ...

On the supply side you have lots of players making about 10k an hour doing combat missions or OW PvE and stuggling to reach that next ship - Even a Pcikle costs about 50k with guns. But you also have a few players making over a million in a couple of hours, a 50:1 difference. Huge quantities of gold are entering the server and, although the forums are screaming with people complaining they have no money I can easily see you deciding to cut combat rewards (you recently put up NPC ship prices - that went down well, didn't it?) in an attempt to curb inflation ,when it isn't the poor players valiantly fighting that are causing inflationary pressures in the first place.

You might say, well, the 10lk and hour midshipman mission players can just go and follow Slamz' advice and make their millions too. But where would that leave us? Isn't that just promoting the server wealth generation that this post-wipe austerity is supposed to avoid?

I don't have access to the game data and I could be wrong, but please look at how much money is entering and leaving the servers, how, and by how many people. Also look at how much OW combat, how much OW PvP there is compared with times of similar population before the wipe was announced. My guess is there is now less OW activity, except for uncontested RvR grinds for conquest marks (and how many of the playerbase engage in this?). I thought the idea was to encourage OW PvP, but to my eyes the post wipe economy does the opposite.

Thanks for making it clear for everyone. You still play? Hows your econ these days?

Edited by Wind
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