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Profiteering: The New Crew Skill

June 4, 2012 by 1 Comment

If you are playing an alt, and can’t decide which crew skill combination to take, may I suggest that you take the “Profiteering” crew skills:

  • Slicing
  • Underworld Trading
  • Treasure Hunting

While you won’t be able to make anything with this combination of crew skills, you should be able to sell the items that these crew skills generate for a significant amount of credits.

Slicing of course yields augments which sell for a moderate sum of credits, but they also give mission rewards that can sell for anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 credits (your server may vary).

Underworld Trading resources are in high demand since this resource is required by three different crafting professions.  Even on my relatively low populated server, Mandalorian Iron is still selling for 10,000 credits a piece.  You will also get the occasional orange schematic.  The common ones don’t sell very well, but there are a few schematics that are rare that will sell for a pretty credit.

Treasure Hunting also yields resources that are high in demand.  Players love their colored crystals, and as a result, artificers are always in need of resources for these crystals.  These missions also have a chance to yield orange gear, which may sell for a few thousand credits.

If you are at the point where you would like to focus on making credits as opposed to crafting gear to help out your character or guild, you should focus on these three crew skills, and watch the profits build up.

Filed Under: Crew Skills, Economy, Gear Tagged With: , , , , ,

SWTOR Tip of the Day: Rich Slicing Missions are Your Friend

June 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

If you have slicing maxed out at 400 and are looking to acquire crafting missions to sell on the GTN, look for Rich Lockbox missions in the level 41-48 range.  I have gotten several purple trading missions from these.

Abundant 49-50 lockbox missions will give them as well, but it seems like they don’t give crafting missions as often as the Rich 41-48 slicing missions do.

Filed Under: Crafting, Crew Skills, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , ,

SWTOR Tip of the Day: Look at the Sliced Tech Parts on the GTN

May 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been noticing on my GTN that several players have been selling stacks of sliced tech parts for below their intrinsic value.  That means that you can buy them off of the GTN and sell them to an NPC vendor for a profit.

It doesn’t always happen, but it is worth checking out.  With a low player base, it looks like some people are just trying to sell anything they can on the GTN and aren’t paying attention to their pricing.

Filed Under: Crew Skills, Economy Tagged With: , , , , ,

SWTOR Tip of the Day: Don’t Cancel Your GTN Listing

April 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

If you cancel your GTN listing before it expires, you will lose your deposit.  Keep in mind, you can cancel your auction at anytime, so it would be advised to not do so unless you have a REALLY good reason, like you found a buyer for your item that is willing to pay more than what you have it listed for.

Filed Under: Commerce, Economy, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , ,

SWTOR Tip of the Day: Indecisive About Crafting? Choose Slicing

January 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

If you are undecided about which crafting profession or which crew skills to take on (especially if you are rolling an alt.) choose slicing.  Yes, slicing got nerfed not long after launch, but you can still make money from the profession.  The lockboxes are still yielding credits, just not as many credits as they once were.  Also, the crafting missions that you get along with the augments still sell well on the GTN, so you can still make a tidy profit slicing.

In addition to slicing, pick up a couple of gathering professions as well.  That way you can pick up resources while you are running around until you finally decide which crafting skills you want to fully develop.  Raw materials/resources always sell and you will have plenty of them if your crafting profession won’t have a use for them.

Filed Under: Crafting, Crew Skills, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , ,

Four Tips for Running a Successful SWTOR Crafting Business

January 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Are you having selling things on the SWTOR Galactic Trade Network?  Instead of selling a few items from time to time, hoping that they are priced right, and hoping that someone will buy them, why not establish an actual crafting business, where customers come to you?  It can be done, but it takes a little hard work, some time, and some great customer service skills.  Here are four tips for building a great SWTOR crafting business:

1.  Build A Customer List.  Keep a record of who purchased your item and exactly what they purchased.  This is a paying customer:  the lifeblood of your business!  Send them a quick follow up email thanking them for your purchase and letting them know that if they need anything else that you would be happy to help them out.  As a consumer yourself, you should know that you would frequent a business that showed outstanding customer service.  The same applies in a virtual world as well.

This email list will become invaluable as time goes on.  It is going to take some time to track all of your orders, but once you have an established customer list, it will become the most essential part of your business. Building any kind of a business takes some work, but the rewards will be lucrative.

Since you will be working with this list quite often, pick a tool that makes sense for you to use in order to build and maintain your list.  Remember this will be something that you will be working with everyday and if you are successful can grow quite large.  You may want to stick with good old fashioned pen and paper at first and then build up to a spreadsheet, or taking notes in a cloud application like Evernote.

2.  Communicate With Your Previous Customers.  Since you have a record of who purchased what from your crafting inventory, send the appropriate customers an email when you place items for sale on the GTN.  For example, if you just crafted a bunch of med packs and listed them for sale, send all of your prior med pack customers an email letting them know that X Number of Med Packs are for sale on the GTN @ 100 credits each.”  Remember: don’t SPAM them.  Just politely let them know that they are available by sending them one email.

The purpose in doing this is to keep the line of communication open.  Your customers will be happy that you are thinking of them by letting them know before anyone else that your goods are available for sale.  You could even mention something in the email about “letting them know first.”  Putting your established customers first builds a relationship with them.  Since they know that they are a priority they may begin to seek you out when they need something crafted for them.

3.  Build Relationships.  How great would it be to have customers coming to you with crafting requests?  Instead of throwing some of your stuff up on the GTN, and hoping someone buys it, you will get regular requests for orders.  You may not even have time to list your stuff on the GTN.  You will be too busy with your regular customers!

Buy communicating with your customers, tracking your sales, and offering your buyers exactly what they want at a fair price, they will be coming back to you time and time again.  Once word gets out that not only do you craft great stuff, but that you have great customer service and treat your customers fairly, word will travel around the galaxy (server) that people need to look no further than your humble little crafting shop.

4.  Keep Your Customers Happy.  Don’t let success go to your head.  Offer your customers a discount once in a while.  Keep your regular customers happy by discounting items on occasion.  Or send them some freebies now and then.  In the SWTOR universe, people have a lot of choice when it comes to vendors and you want to keep your established customers happy.  If they aren’t feeling the love, they will be quick to move on to the next person that can give them a better deal.

Remember, good customer service and keeping your customers happy work just as well in a virtual world as they do in real life.  Try out a few of these tips and see if your business takes off!

 

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Your First MMO- Making Money

August 8, 2011 by 1 Comment

This is a series of posts for anyone new to the MMO genre of video game.  SWTOR is sure to be very popular and for many people, it may be the first online game that they have played.  These articles introduce the basic aspects of a MMO and offer a few tips along the way. 

One of the first things that you will notice almost as soon as you start playing any MMO is that it features an in game economy, complete with a currency and many goods up for sale.  The currency in SWTOR will be Credits, but it could be gold, dollars, jellybeans….. anything really.

Just as in real life, everything in an MMO costs money.  In other MMOs, I’ve needed in game money to buy better (aka more powerful gear), buy raw materials, travel, repair items, and even pay taxes on my house!  While SWTOR may not require credits for all of these activities, it will certainly allow players to earn credits to buy various items that they will either want or need to help your character along its journey.

How does one go about making money in an MMO?  We don’t know the specifics that will be available in SWTOR, but the following strategies can be applied to most MMOs on the market today.  Hopefully, SWTOR will not be an exception.

Questing.  This just in from the Obvious Department:  You can earn money by questing in an MMO.  It goes without saying that questing is going to be the main source of income for your character for most of its life, especially in the lower levels.  Each quest you complete should give you a monetary reward for completing it.

The key is to maximize the rewards from questing.  Many MMOs have “daily quests,” quests that you can repeat each day for some type of reward.  Don’t always focus on which daily quests offer the biggest reward.  In an MMO, real time is precious.  Look for the ones that you know you can complete in the least amount of time.  It will allow you to earn more money before the phone rings, the baby cries, or your Aunt Linda shows up for an unexpected visit.

Cash for Loot.  Most enemies in an MMO drop items or “loot” when they are killed.  This can be money, gear (such as weapons or armour), or junk items that you can sell to a NPC vendor for some loose change.  Valuable loot items can be sold in the in game auction house.  Here, real players will determine the value of the item by bidding on it.  It’s pretty neat, since you will get to see the concepts you learned in high school economics class about supply, demand, and the free market in action.

Crafting.  Often, crafting (making) virtual items in a MMO can feel like you are running your own real life business.  You have to obtain raw materials (either buying them, or finding them yourself), monitor your inventory, make the item, advertise/promote your services, and monitor your pricing.  Depending on how deep and complex the crafting system is, it can truly become a “game within the game.”

Becoming one of the better crafters on your server can put you on the path to fame and fortune.  However, crafting typically takes a large investment of time in order to start out, master your craft, and get to a point where you can sell your better goods for a nice profit.  For those willing to put in the time, crafting is worth the investment.  However, many people don’t and would rather spend their game time in battle, not over a workbench.

Playing the Auction House.  This method requires a little more patience, as well as a deep understanding of your server’s local economy, but the payoff can be very lucrative as well.  This strategy involves browsing the auction house to “buy low and sell high.”  People place items selling below market value up for auction all the time.  Reasons for doing this may be that they may not know what they are truly worth, are trying to clear out space in their inventory, or just want to have a sale (my favorite ones are the “leaving the game” sale).

If you know that you can sell a particular item for more than the asking price, buy it, turn it around and sell it for a higher price.  This method of “flipping” virtual items has worked out well for many players.

We don’t know the details of the SWTOR economy, or the different methods you can use to make credits in the game.  However, it would be a fairly safe bet to assume these four methods (or at least some variation of these methods) should work in the game since they are present in almost every other MMO on the market today.

Do you have a favorite way to make money in an MMO?  Let me know in the comments below.

Filed Under: Beginner, Economy Tagged With: , , , , , ,