Void's Advanced Merchanting Guide
Maplestory Guide: Advanced Merchanting
(WARNING: LONG READ)
Introduction
Hi! I’ve made this guide to help people make more mesos then what common guides say. The conventional Mapler will tell you “Buy low sell high.” This is not necessarily true in making large quantities of profit. The purpose of this guide is to expand a Mapler’s options in merchanting. In order to understand what I’m saying throughout the guide you must know these economic terms (I’ve tried to simplify them as much as possible).
Vocabulary
Spoiler![SIZE=2]Adaptive Expectations - A theory of how people form their views about the future that assumes they do so using past trends and the errors in their own earlier predictions
Altruism – Self interest in an item. Specifically is it a powerful wanted item? Or is it weak and useless
Bear Run – The act of an item decreasing in value. Many people selling the item to not lose profit
Bull Run – The act of an item increasing in value. Many people buying it to obtain profit
Communication – The interaction and confirming of prices
Deflation – Decrease in the price of items through supply and demand
Demography – Server population affecting prices.
Externality – How the value of one item affects another
Guilds – How they control the market and what they do
Inflation – Rise in the price of items through supply and demand.
Intervention – How Nexon’s/Hackers decisions effect Maple story’s economy
Monopoly – Eliminating competition and setting the price for goods
Over Speculation – Incorrect prediction of an items value. (Controls market greatly)
Productivity – The buying and selling of goods to circulate the economy
Short Selling – Buying an item at a lower price and immediately selling for a higher price
Long Selling – Investing in a particular item and waiting for the price to rise
Sniping – Winning an auction by outbidding at the very last moments (Basil Market deals)
Supply and Demand – The economic principle of producers meeting the requirements of consumers
Phew! That’s quite a bit to take in. Throughout reading the guide you can refer back to this vocabulary list. If you still have the patience read on!
Tools of the TradeSpoiler!Calculator – To add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
Paper – List prices, items sold, items bought, mesos gained, and mesos lost.
Pen/Pencil – Refer above. Duh!
Windowed mode (optional) – Important for multi-tasking or other entertainment
Microsoft Excel (optional) – Helps with pricing instead of using a paper and pen/pencil
Food – I’m a fatty!
These are the bare necessities that I use. If anything else assists you by all means use it as well!
Common ConceptionsSpoiler!Common Conceptions are merchanting methods that always work. They are very widespread and almost every merchant uses them. Do not misunderstand as I am not saying these are bad methods, but that everyone knows it and some of them narrow a Maplers options in making mesos.
Browsing FM is a very common thing to do to view the prices of items. It is considered the best way to merchant and to find good deals that can be liquidated for profit. I will tell you later on how to manipulate this.
Productivity is any actions that affect the economy. Buying, selling, consuming, and producing anything. It is anything someone does to gain mesos from doing the GFA 60% quest to mining for ores and plates.
Store permits undoubtedly yield the largest gain in profit. Almost every merchant uses one to sell items.
Buy Low Sell High is the mentality that’s carved in every merchant’s brain. It is in fact a highly stable and effective way of gaining profit. But it narrows options to better opportunities of making mesos.
You offer first is the way to haggle the buyer or seller if they do not know the price of an item. It does hold a big advantage to a merchant, but can lose a much wanted item.
Understanding the EconomySpoiler!This is the most important aspect of merchanting. Without knowledge of Maplestory economy you cannot determine how much an item can be sold for or how much to buy one for. I’ll go through many aspects and ideas you should know. YOU WILL LOSE MESOS AT ONE POINT IN TIME. Yes I said it. The most important thing to learn is you will not always gain mesos. Somewhere along the line of merchanting an item will do the opposite of your prediction. Do not get emotionally attached to losses in mesos. It can jeopardize judgment for future possible profits. Don’t be afraid to invest when you see opportunities. Tax plays an important role always include it in calculations! It should be the first thing you calculate before selling any item. Moving on I’m going to list a few of my experiences, how they correspond to Maplestory economy, and why I listed the vocabulary above.
Adaptive Expectations and Altruism
Spoiler!One thing you must always look out for is Adaptive Expectations. An example would be the recipe events. When people began to realize that you would receive rising sun recipes the market soon was flooded with them. Naturally, the recipes have a high Altruism as they provide nice stats and a pretty good set effect. When I saw this my first instinct was to dump all my recipes to the highest bidder immediately. Before the recipe went on a Bear Run. Not everyone can afford to make the rising set nor do they have the time (level 10 crafting). Pay attention to events as they should be your keen focus on Adaptive Expectations.
Externality and Monopolies
Spoiler!Well how can I increase my profits even more from the recipe events? This goes onto Externality. What are the materials used to create a Rising Sun equip? Think of a medium supplied item that is now high in demand. Got it? Good. The answer is superior item crystals. They have enough face value to be merchanted for high profits and are in high demand from the recent recipes. A standard merchant would think to look through the FM find crystals for a cheap price by someone who doesn’t know Inflation is occurring. This is perfectly fine and will yield that merchant great output.
What I decided to do having 7 billion mesos is play a Monopoly. I went to every shop in the FM for a week (Windia) and bought every single superior item crystal I could find. Generally, they were at around 8 – 10 million mesos each. On occasion I found some for 12 – 15 million mesos each. My plan was to set the price at 13 million mesos each roughly. You know what I did? I bought those crystals even though I would get a decrease in profit. Well why the heck would you do that? You’re losing mesos! No, I am not. Get that “Buy low sell high” mentality out of the gutter. This goes back to Browsing FM. When people start doing it and they see in Channel 1 FM 3 that someone bought superior item crystals for 15 million mesos they’ll start telling their guild buddies crystals are going up. Ok, some might think one guy was just in a rush but the main importance is to get the attention of the people who actually want the crystals. In the process of a monopoly DO NOT dump your monopolized item all at once. When you set something like this in motion throw the monopolized item into the market in small packs. There are two reasons for this.
First, the item will slowly Bull Run overtime where you can gradually set the value higher, thus obtaining more profit.
Second, people might think you’re a hoarder and can possibly hurt future bargains even though it’s true Haha. To conclude I spent about 2.8 billion mesos on the initial purchasing and collected about 3.2 billion mesos (including tax). It took me about two weeks to sell off all the crystals.
IMPORTANT DO NOT USE MONOPOLIES ON A MAINSTREAM ITEM THAT IS HIGH/LOW IN PRODUCTIVITY OR LOW IN DEMAND OR HIGH IN COST. (Ex. Work Gloves, VIP Items, Plates, Snail Shells, etc.)
Reasons:
1. You can’t afford buying out all the high in cost items
2. High in cost items get duped constantly
3. Highly productive items are always flushed into the economy where you can’t reach
4. Low demand items have no altruism thus giving either to small of a profit or none at all
5. Low productivity items are difficult to search for in the FM
Solution:
1. Find an item that is medium supply and medium demand where you have MORE than enough mesos to monopolize it
2. Spread the word that the item is inflating
3. Sell item in small packs
Guilds and InterventionSpoiler!Guilds, Hackers, and Nexon affect Maplestory’s economy greatly. This mainly goes into the idea of Adaptive Expectations and Altruism, but it has some key differences.
First, Guilds provide Communication, Productivity, and Demography. Chatting together people will talk about pricing items and auctioning. This is important because we can manipulate guild gossip to control marketing. The productivity comes in when guilds boss together and sell their loot. Unification in game servers always starts with guilds which helps demography that eventually fluctuates the economy.
Second, we move onto merchanting guilds and Hackers. I put them in the same category as merchanting guilds because they tend to have hackers in them or they hire hackers. They like duping items, monopolizing, and scamming. I HIGHLY recommend not joining a merchanting guild. They will probably scam you in some way, but really they are stingy cheap people who aren’t nice to have as friends. Everyone knows about duping and scamming so I’ll tell you about their monopolies. Awhile ago there was a war between two different merchanting guilds in Windia. They decided to channel crash each other for FM1 monopoly spots (Oh by the way NEVER buy something in FM1 merchanting guilds always jack up 50% – 200% of initial worth). It happened for a long time absolutely crushing Windia’s economy. Knowing this, understand the great importance of Hackers and why we have to work around them.
Third, we have Nexon. Nexon makes events and patches to keep players interested in the game. Mainly we’ll focus on events as they have a bigger impact than most people realize. Recently, the majority of events have been focused on scrolls, recipes, and potions. Using Adaptive Expectations we know they’ll be the items dumped to the community and fall in price quickly. Knowing this there are TONS of options you can take. You can do Basil Trades (Honestly so many items are mispriced on there you can make over 1000% profit) Short Selling which I’ll go onto explain later or dumping as well. The most important thing to know is in an event Deflation will ALWAYS occur to some other item. Next we have patches. The huge ones are the ones that rebalance classes, implement new bosses and equips, or create new classes. Look out for these as they change the Supply and Demand of the community.
Short Term Selling and Long Term Selling
Spoiler!Short Selling and Long Selling are the two different ways to sell items. They are the basis for analyzing economical changes in Maplestory. Certain items can only be short term sold or long term sold.
Short Selling is infinitely better for the poor. Someone who has less mesos to spare can afford lower priced items and quickly sell them. Short selling increases mesos quickly, but is less effective. It can be used when an item is Deflating or Inflating. Most people don’t know how to make mesos on an item that is on a Bear Run. You have to buy the item at its decreased price. Then you have to sell it at the average price to someone who hasn’t been watching the market or through a Basil auction. I prefer this method of sells on items that are very unstable. Ex. Chaos scrolls, White scrolls, Mastery books, etc.
Long Selling is usually an investment in one item that is highly valuable and waiting (sometimes auctioning) to dump the item at a higher price. This method involves stable items and makes more mesos in the long term. It is more effective, but requires more mesos, thus making it better for the rich. Ex. VIP items, Godly’s, etc.
Over Speculation and Hyper Inflation
Spoiler!Over Speculation creates a Hyper Inflation. Well what do I mean by this? Hyper inflation is the worst form of economic development. It hurts EVERYONE even Nexon to some peoples disbelief. This is centered on the NX to mesos ratio. It also is controlled by hackers and dupers.
I’ll give you an example of when Hyper Inflation happened. It involves the MTS hackings. Before Nexon patched it you could see some ones username in the MTS. Thousands of accounts were stripped and their belongings thrown into meso selling sites. The sites competing with each other decided to throw out massive amounts of sales to the public because of their overflow in mesos and NX. This caused a Hyper Inflation of the NX to meso ratio. Over Speculation on the NX to meso ratio made work gloves rise in price. When these come into play it lowers the value of mesos. I predict in the next couple of years (as long as there are still many hackers) for the NX to meso ratio to continue increasing.
Basil Market Auctioning
Spoiler!Basil Market is a great tool that is highly under rated. Many people don’t use it because of its inaccuracy. We’re going to use it SPECIFICALLY for its inaccuracy. Prices listed on here do not update with Maplestory’s economy. That’s good for us because if an item is cheaper on Basil then it is in game we can buy it and resale it for face value. Vice versa, if an item is cheaper in game it can be sold onto Basil for a higher price. This is a giant Loophole that people have not realized yet. In order do this you need a technique called Sniping or outbidding someone at the last second. Without it you cannot get items at the value you want.
Tip: if an auction is taking awhile hit +watch to keep track of the auction
I recommend Basil Trades for Short Selling. It takes some time for you to contact the seller which can already alter the value of the item. So, selling the item immediately is the safer and more stable route. Not to mention the fact some sellers may never log on and you’ll never get the item. To sum it all up I want you to view Basil as a separate economy.
MTS Section
Spoiler!Ahh, Maplestory Trading System it's where the exchange of Nx to meso ratio takes place. You'll need at minimum 10 billion mesos to merchant here. The MTS is a high roller and when you've began to merchant here you can consider yourself one of the richest people in Maplestory. Moving on some of the economic principles i mentioned above do not apply.
Let me explain it to you like this:
Trades in FM are generally chaotic for one must travel from portal to portal searching for a deal or spam constantly and bargain with others.
Trades on Basil are very organized because they list everything that is sold for what price and how much it can be auctioned for.
But, the MTS is organized while its chaotic. Items you want can be found quickly, but looking for the right deal one must siphon through a list.
This tells us we must draft a new way to control and manipulate the market. So, i'm going to tell you what i do and how it works. (Note: There is a flat 500 Nx fee and 7% Nx tax on every transaction)
All Mesos
All mesos is the most common route that is very effective. Keep it simple is the phrase. Focus all merchanting on mesos and buy main stream items (Work gloves) that get dumped to the MTS for Nx. It helps fund the must needed cubing and other decorative equipment. I recommend this highly to someone starting out in order to determine pricing and how the MTS economy develops.
I came I saw I conquer
The strong stomp the weak in life and that is how we will do it in the MTS. The process is to sight relatively powerful equip that is cheap. Buy it and use a potential scroll (don't reveal it!) on it and resell it for mesos that is higher than the Nx to meso ratio for which you bought the item. Then use the mesos to buy a main stream item that can be sold quickly in the MTS. Obviously this is very risk intensive (if you have low diligence) so i recommend 100 diligence for a 100% chance of success.
[CENTER]Still editing[/CENTER]
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