Door charge

When it comes to entering any market there's going to be a door charge, an entrance fee of sorts. This is what you're going to have to pay and invest up front before you can even think about selling anything. Today I'm going to talk about what price you'll have to pay with any new market in rift and the potential consequences of such.

As per usual, I'll get the obvious out of the way first; money. In the business world we all know that it takes money to make money, and life on the AH in an MMO is no exception. You'll have to first skill up your trade skills, throwing away 90% of the cash you could be making off selling the mats as is. Luckily though, each profession has some form of a salvage option to get back some of the materials. Salvaging also gives you unique mats that can only be gotten FROM salvaging, these are used to make temporary item enhancements.

One example is whetstones which increase melee crit damage. These items help recoup your losses at higher levels and salvaging lets you sneak in a few dozen extra skill ups in the mean time. Bear in mind that it's not worth buying things just to salvage unless you're after the "salvaged only" type of materials as you're not promised the raw mats that went into it. The key thing here is learning how to cut costs and corners in every way possible. This is step number one in reducing your entrance fee which is essential to maximizing your profits.

The next and most important price you have to pay is time. Time is not free and is the most valuable commodity a human being will ever have access to. I say this because time is the only thing which you cannot change, reform, make more or less of. The time you have now is the only time you get. Each day has only 24 hours, no more no less. So learning how to "spend" your time wisely is imperative to being cost effective and reducing the price you have to pay with a new market.

The time investment in rift is much akin to the investment needed for the JC market in wow. You get dailys to do for crafting tokens which let you buy special recipes. Now you might be thinking "How can you be more time efficient when you have a hard limit on quests" but there are still ways to get around this as it were. But first we have to divide by zero and split up the definition of time.

In terms of breaking into a market that needs you to do daily quests you have to think of it in time frames, and not just a total number of hours. Meaning it will take X days to get this recipe and Y for that. This is different than total times because you can only do these quests once per day so your "total time" won't be more than an hour or two, even though ti's spread out over the course of a month.

Important distinction.

Since the higher you get in skill the more tokens you get form these quests you can sort of fake your way through it to a point. You can choose what form of currency (total time or money) you are capable of investing more of. You can power level your professions at the expense of a huge sum of cash so that you can get the most amount of tokens immediately as opposed to three weeks from now. This will cut the time frame of (fake numbers) 3 months down to 2 months.

This is obviously a significant decrease, albeit fictitious, but you can see the point I'm trying to make. By going this route you will be able to start working that market and selling those rare items immensely faster than only taking skill ups as you level.

The other "currency" that you can invest in is total time spent. By this I mean that you can just farm everything. You will drastically lower the plat cost but at the expense of not having much fun on game. This will also reduce the time frame, but depending on what you have more of (and value least) decides your course of action.

Whichever route you choose the goal should always be the same, get as many tokens as possible as fast as possible. The sooner you get into a market the faster you're going to turn a profit. Or lose everything. Ya know, whichever comes first.


Thanks for stopping by!