Getting Free Ecto From the Trading Post

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Twystyd
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Getting Free Ecto From the Trading Post

Postby Twystyd » Sat Nov 10, 2012 11:16 am

This used to be an amazing way to make money but due to the huge increase in gem prices and the drop in ecto value this stopped being profitable a while ago. But since the rise of ecto price the last week this might again be a consistent, reliable, and kinda mostly safe way to have money trickling into your bank without ever having to leave LA! The way it used to work is: You buy a rare with a good rune/sigil, salvage it with a black lion salvage kit, the good rune/sigil covers the cost of the salvage kit, the ecto covers the cost of the rares, and any extra ecto you get is pure profit. Few things are different now though. All of which are kinda bad still even with higher ecto prices.

    - gems are really really really expensive, meaning black lion kits may be less profitable than master/mystic salvage kits
    - if master/mystic kits are more profitable, this method becomes less reliable
    - rune prices are down, cutting into the "reliable" part of the income
    - buy orders for rares are a lot higher, meaning it's harder to get them filled at the prices you want

Because of these differences, this might not be a guaranteed way to get money, but I want to get the discussion going on the potential for this before other people catch on. As long as the way things are now, it might be a good way to make money. The only two things that would ruin it are:

    - Ecto bubble bursting, it's one of the most traded items now. This means the price is artificially high from market speculators stocking up to sell high. The minute the speculators with hundreds of them decide it's time to cash in the prices are likely to drop again.
    - People putting up a ton of high buy orders for rare items


So as a warning to you guys, if you put up a buy order for 5 of whatever item at an inflated price, you won't actually get more out of it because someone else will just outbid you, all that will happen is that you'll be destroying your own profit margins and stopping yourself from making more money. So only buy a few rares at a time. And if rune prices crash for whatever reason, which randomly happens, you may lose your listing fee. Which is another good reason to only buy a few rares at a time. Don't place insane buy orders or you'll just ruin it for everyone including yourself. This shouldn't need to be said, but there are people who still don't understand this: only raise buy orders by 1 copper max because your orders will not get filled faster if you put up an order at 10 copper or whatever higher than the current highest despite what you may believe

In order to do research into making money out of this I made a quick spreadsheet and put in some numbers here - https://docs.google....ZvdEpFVlE#gid=3
It's just a rough draft*

The return rates for ecto I'm guessing 1.25 ecto on average for black lion kit and 0.8 ecto on average for mystic/master kit. This could be way off. When I was doing this every day I actually needed the ecto for stuff so I couldn't keep track of how much I got accurately. The script for updating prices isn't going to work without some rewrites so leave that be for now. The way it looks now, using a mystic salvage kit or a black lion kit isn't a huge difference in profit anymore, but I intentionally put a huge difference in ecto return rate for the 2 kits as you can see on the data page. If you increase the return rate on ecto for mystic/master kits to 1, the profit goes up significantly.

This can also be done with exotics as explained on this Relics of Orr podcast-
fast forward to 38:30
http://www.relicsoforr.com/?p=2236%C2%A0%C2%A0

That's with exotics though, it works with the same principle but buy orders for exotics almost never get filled. Another issue with exotics is that each profitable rune/sigil only has 2-3 possible exotics that drop with that upgrade rather than 10-20 like with rares, so you can't really put up a ton of buy orders and hope they get filled. I used to put up buy orders for all profitable exotics, and only maybe 1 got filled overnight at most. I found it way too annoying to keep doing it.
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