A Practical and personal Guide to making serious gold.

I have a main that is around mid-80s level and an alt that is lower. I am a casual player and work full time, meaning I do not have countless hours to play each day. All together in my month and a half of playing I have made more than 7 billion (if not more). This guide will explain how I did it, and how you can replicate my success in fairly short time.

I am still low level because I am a casual player and do not care to race to the top in levels. I enjoy FL and going through all the quests solo. If you do race upwards fairly fast, this guide is not for you as it is very easy to make money at the high levels by just selling the loot.

To start with - I dislike the usual buy low and sell high explanations and "guides". A lot of that involves huge amounts of time scouring the market for the deals, and dying of boredom in the meantime. That is not to say that I do not do that but that's just a simple gift that is given to us and does not require much thought.

Alright, so, when I first started, I looked at the Market to see the most obvious ways to make money and equip my mercs in the best stuff for their level.

I - Boxes

It is quite clear from a cursory examination that many of the items from boxes sell for more than the cost of the box. I saved up some money (by selling loot) and bought a bunch of insect boxes at few k per. I saw that some of the items went for above 10k and resold those. Then I examined the next few tiers of boxes (bran, dark night, babylon) and by looking at the market prices found the tier that was profitable and one that wasn't. Those box profitabilities change somewhat from time to time but bran and babylon were just fine to use.

After a week or so I graduated to the higher level boxes and examined Pyramid, Osiris, and Shogun. At that time Shogun was great but I was not making money all that fast until I hit on Volcano Valley. Think about it - I was buying those VV boxes for an average of 270k and over 75% of the items from them sold for higher, with a few items going for as high as a million. At this point my profit started hitting the multi-million mark.

Here is the problem that unfortunately stops many people from continuing. As we all know, the stuff coming from the boxes is random. What happens when you spend your hard earned 3 million gold on 12 Volcano Valley boxes and you get 5 spears, 4 cannons, and 3 swords all of which could at any particular time go for 200k or less? A lot of people throw their hands in the air and say - this crap is gambling and it's not worth it - I give up.

DO NOT spend YOUR LAST MONEY on a few boxes. Yes 12 is still a few. To have decent odds at making profit your safety is in numbers. And make sure you leave some cash just in case. And also make sure you can afford some momentary setbacks without breaking down. Be patient. I do not consider myself lucky in any way whatsoever, but by buying 20-30-50 boxes at a time I made loads of money in a few days.

II - Selling

You might ask - how did you manage to sell all those items quick enough to get rid of all the boxes and progress to the next tier? The answer is I undercut others. Simple enough? Yes but not really. There is a way to undercut that works and that's not going 1 or 10 gold under someone else. Perhaps it does work to some degree, but it pisses off enough people (since it happens to most of us) that many just buy the item of the person that is being undercut by that 1 or 10 gold. Don't be cheap. Drop a decent amount. Maybe that is 2% for the high end items and 5-10% for the lower end. 1-10-100 gold undercutting is cheap and people get pissed off. I bought items that were being undercut by that amount myself and I can't be the only one.

At the same time, do not undercut too much. It is stupid on multiple levels. First you are losing that much more potential profit, but second you are potentially devaluing the item for other people, and many others might further undercut you without realizing that the item is already low. When this happens, the item category becomes ripe for a takeover (See section V) and I might swoop in and just buy your stuff to resell for a tidy profit.

Some might say - by undercutting you are missing out on higher profit. That every time you take your item off the market to undercut someone who undercut you, you are wasting money. Also some might say that if you leave the item on the market long enough it will sell in a vast majority of cases (either through natural attrition of the price or through people needing large quantities of said item). That is true. But I will submit to you that time is a very important component of making profit.

The faster you can get rid of all your items for somewhat smaller profit (but not ridiculously low profit or loss, unless the item just sucks and then it is a justifiable loss), the faster you can put a new batch of items to sell for that same somewhat smaller profit. The sum of those slightly smaller profits will dwarf your larger time consuming profits.

III - Using Alts

By the time I got to Volcano boxes, I realized that the few item spots we get on the market are just too few and sell too slow no matter how much you undercut. Some weekdays especially. I created 2 alts, leveled them up to level 3, popped them into a Japanese city with a 1% market/bank rate (very important - don't waste too much money on those fees), and sent 50 Volcano boxes to each of them. I then opened them all up and put them for sale.

Obviously you do not want to waste time constantly logging on to them to check on the items and undercut others, but once or twice a day check and reset can be plenty to add loads of extra income. If you have the time and are not too bored doing that, utilize your other character slots

IV - Enchanting

I will not get into enhancing in this guide. I don't do it. Well maybe, but on a very small scale on equipment for my alt, when it is financially feasible and worthwhile to gamble on low level equipment. Instead I want to focus on enchanting as a great way of making money.

By the time I got to Conqueror's and Frozen boxes, I realized that +2/+3 items are quite valued for FL purposes, sell quickly (much quicker than higher +), and maximize both your time and profit. We are talking about [Adv] enchanting. I do not recommend it for the [Int] stage for the Market - might be a waste of time.

Enchanting always works and there is a slight chance of actually getting a higher + enchant than the sum of the parts.

When you enchant items at the [Adv] level, they are quite often sold for the straight out multiplier of the cost of the parts. So if a Conqueror's Heavy Armor is currently going for 2mil, then +2 Heavy Armor (composed of 4 +0 armors) often goes for 8mil. Why waste time selling these armors 1 by 1 when you can just enchant (200k cost or so) - and sell it quicker. Remember that somewhat smaller profit is better than the slow higher profit.

You would not believe the amount of +2/+3 Conqueror's and Freezing armors and weapons that I've sold. Yes, I lost money on some of them, but on a majority the profit was in the millions. Especially the freezing/conq stuff like Boots, Gauntlets, Heavy Armors, Orbs, Swords, Shields, Axes, Staffs, and Helms.

And it's very nice to once in a while to get that +2/+3 out of 2 +0 items. Others will envy you

V - Shaping the Market (advanced)

So you got loads of money by following my advice and are thinking of ways of making money even quicker. In the course of following the guide and selling all those items you will often be frustrated at frequent devaluation of the non-Heavy Melee items. For example you created a Light Freezing Armor +2 after buying the boxes at 2.2m, with enchant stones costing you about 9m, and after seeing most +0 LFMs going currently at 3m, you put your +2 Armor on the market for 12m. Nice and tidy potential profit of 3m. Ten hours later you glance at the market and notice that there are a bunch of +0 LFMs now on the market for 2m and a few +2s for 8m... They have severely undercut you and put your item into the loss category.

I am only using Light Freezing Armor as an example and not as an advice to do the following on, as item dynamics vary and various approaches work better depending on various variables - including not doing anything and just taking the loss in MOST CASES. You will make money on other items so don't worry.

However, you notice that there are just 5 +0 LFMs on the market with costs ranging from 2m to 3.2m, then there are 2 +1 LFMs at 4.5m, and 2 +2 LFMs at 8m with your pathetic +2 LFM sitting out there at 12m, not looking likely to be sold. Doesn't it just frustrate you? But you got a few 100mil in the banks and a profit-minded attitude

What can you do? Well, buy everything up and set your own prices! Control that market. There might be a few other +3 LFMs hanging out there with low prices - you can buy them too. Or if they are priced well, leave them there. Buy all the +0, +1, and +2s - the ones that are very undervalued. Take your own crap off the market. Enchant the +0s and +1s, put your +2 back on the market for 14-15m (not too crazy, some other items like Swords, Shields, Gauntlets, Boots can go for 20 at times), put one or two +0s on the market for 4m to justify the +2 price, save 1 or 2 +2 for when your item sells, and if you have too many of those, create 1 or 2 +3/+4 and put it up at a nice profit as well.

Now the entire category is controlled by you. I've bought out a 200+mil worth category of Freezing Heavy Armors and made 50-100mil after my +4/+6 and a few +2s sold at higher prices that I set.

Sometimes you won't make much money with some tactics. And sometimes you might even lose a bit and it might take a while to sell (still use that undercutting even with the million gold costs). But those are high value items, and the majority of the time you will make a profit especially since you do the market shapping when those items are already almost at the BOTTOM. Which means that even if they don't sell until they drop to the bottom, you will not lose much money at all.

ONLY USE THIS TACTIC after familiarizing yourself with the Server Market dynamics for those particular items. Don't just buy out random categories Those categories might be overpriced or sell especially slowly.

In my experience Melee items sell faster than Ranged and Magic.


Well that's it for now. These strategies have worked for me, and if you read through, you can see that they are very simplistic. So why isn't everyone else rich? Many people do not have the patience to follow through. But if you do, you will not lack for money at lower levels again even if you don't have that much time to spend on the game. Good luck!

Thanks to Renderer for this contribution, the original can be found here