The Addictiveness of Playing the AH (in Rift)

AH = Auction House btw and well, I'm writing this in the context of Rift. I would write about my AH experience in WoW private servers but that's no challenge - it's really easy to carve out several niche for myself there.

For Ragnarok Online 2, it took me some time but I'd managed to do so too - by selling Chef mats - got a huge monopoly over it for awhile... (Just imagine 50-150 zeny per stack of mats and I can easily get mats by leveling and also stealing other people's dead mob corpses lol - it's not like they needed it anyway) until some other AH-savvy people noticed that I'm earning a lot that way and started infiltrating into my market lol.

Anyway, well, where should I start? Well, I'm not much of a farmer - I'm lazy that way, but I'd say I'm a reseller. I usually buy stuff that are listed at the vendor price or lower than vendor price (that way, I won't incur any losses if I can't sell any of my items - can just vendor it and get my money back :P) or rare stuff that are listed at a (ridiculously) cheap/reasonable price and then, I'll relist it at a higher price.

In order to avoid being undercut almost immediately (lol), I usually list stuff that 1. are not listed by anybody else (the item is THAT rare and I usually list it higher coz well, usually those are stuff that I can use/need) or 2. stuff that I do not need and was bought by me at a very very low price (for example, 25g for an artifact, relist it at 4 plat while undercutting everyone who listed it at 4p and above lol).  

Recently, I've delved into artifact reselling and trust me, seeing how much money I put into buying out artifacts to complete my own collection (over 100plat already... ish), I'd say it's pretty lucrative.... if you get the right artifact to sell.

For example, there was a time where someone listed the rare and elusive Snake Tear for a mere 30g. I bought out all of them and relist them at 20plat per piece. The next day I checked, all of them were sold. That's a huge profit! - but now, the market is pretty saturated with Snake Tear so I'd hold back on my stock and wait patiently for the supply to get lower. :P

But ofc, if you have enough model to start with, you could go into Deeps' Lock Box/ Key reselling. I don't con people out of their items (via trade chat), but if you managed to buyout some cheap Boxes or Keys, you can resell them at a way higher price. I've heard that some people (conman :\) bought the legendary (orange) Box from a newbie for a mere 5 plat only to resell it on AH for 300plat. I don't think I could ever face myself or that person ever again if I did something like this though.

However, IMHO, if that person listed the buyout price as 5plat, then you're not at fault of conning because that person did list the item at that particular buyout price. Like that time where I bought 3 Keys at 15plat (5 plat each) and resold them at 30plat per piece. Boxes can go up to 50plat (blue), 100plat (purple) and 300plat (orange) per piece so the competition for lower than usual priced boxes are very heatedly fought over - just imagine the profit you can gain!

But ofc, if you gain all that profit and, being the miser that you are, you kept it all and don't use them then you're just unbalancing the economy of buying and selling (you're selling but not buying). I, on the other hand, often bought artifacts (as I have aforementioned) to complete my collections - and to get that 200 Lucky Coins mount! :D but ofc, I'm thinking of saving enough to buy a REX as well.  

Note that I am a F2P player and was lucky enough to get 750 credits banked into my character's account after I lodged a complain to Trion about random crashes in dungeons (resulting in me getting kicked out of groups.... sigh. But now I'm happy though xD).

If not, fellow F2Pers have to save money the hard way (farming and/or selling stuff on the trade channel) to buy a REX first before you can start AH-ing most of your stuff away. But whew, trust me when I say, REX is simply too expensive.

Oh yea, for those people wondering, you need a minimum of 1500 loyalty to use the AH (Remember to relog after getting the required loyalty so you can start AH-ing! :) ) [Source]

I don't mind helping you list your items for sale on the AH but ofc, I'll get a little commission out of it (excluding the dunno-how-many-percent AH cut) :P so make sure the items you want to list is definitely sellable. 

In nutshell, earning cash, although it may just be in-game cash, can be rather addictive but ofc tiresome as well - imagine, I used to spent hours just prowling the AH looking for a bargain or two while constantly vigilant of anyone undercutting my items lol. I hardly had any time to actually play - but the feeling of being able to sell any stuff at more than 100% profit is awesome, while managed to buy any 'expensive stuff' or items that you think you need/ is worth it at ridiculously cheap prices is also worth all the trouble I think. :P



Oh and sorry for the wall of text lol. Am cutting it down into shorter paragraphs :P