Auction House and Trading guide for Beginners

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Hallo everyone, my name is Nexafor and this is a small guide I've made to help you understand and/or improve your
trading skills ingame and specifically target the SK auction house as a stable base of general ingame income.
The following text may be a bit long, but I believe it may be worth the read. The method I am going to explain
is simple and does not require any vast knowledge of economics, nor the use of real life money,
instead you will need a healthy dose of logic and planning.

BEFORE YOU CONTINUE: please note that as a beginning player this method will not make you 1337 uber h4xxor! rich,
however it will help you go through the game with a bit more crowns in your pocket if you use it correctly.
Enjoy!

The auction house is a place where every player can go and sell or buy items for crowns.This is the basis of this method,because this is how we will make profit both in long aswell as short terms.
And altough you won't get as much profit out of it as Crystal Energy traders, you will have a stable and reliablesecondary source of income next to doing level runs.
Why stable? Because unlike CE trading where you solely depend on one item (in this case crystal energy)with an unstable price, as a material trader if one of the items you sell falls in price and your income takes a leap you can simply start trading other items, because the auction house has literally 100's of items from which you can choose to buy/sell.
To effectively gain profit out of this you will need to be able to make comparisons, adapt to the needs of the market and be competitive while not being repetitive(in terms of pricing).

The theory behind this method is quite simple.

1. Find suitable materials/items.
2. Sell them for competitive prices.
3. PROFIT.

Before you can do the above tough, you have to be able to understand how you are making profit out of your
100 mist energy you get per day.
The goal is to make enough crowns to buy 100 energy when you spend 100 energy and make a profit next to it.

The first formula is connected to the money you make on the level inside the clockworks which you play.
The second one represents the total amount of profit you make after playing through 100e (theoretical)

LEVEL PROFIT = ACCUIRED CROWNS OF LEVEL - PRICE OF ENERGY USED FOR LEVEL(this varies per day in terms of crowns) + THEORETICAL MATERIAL PROFIT

TOTAL PROFIT FOR 100e = ACCUIRED CROWNS OF TOTAL LEVELS PLAYED FROM 100e - PRICE OF ENERGY FOR 100e + THEORETICAL MATERIAL PROFIT

Now the above two formulae are the ones I use to understand and calculate the profit I make from using 100e
and comparing the amout of crowns I woul've spend and the amount of crowns I gain from level runs
and material trading.
The material profit is theoretical because just like every market there will be times when prizes of theese items rise
and fall, so the materials I sell now may not be worth much over a few months, however because I trade materials and have
done many level runs I have and constantly gain a stream of fresh new materials to replenish my stocks and
effectively keep selling and making profit form several different materials at a time.

ALSO: Typically materials do not sell immediately, it can take a day or two and somtimes they don't sell
at all. This usually means that either the general public has lost interest in the material because the
demand is smaller than the supply causing material prizes to drop for that material, or the price you ask
for the material is repetitive.

A repetitive price is a price that is not found worthy for that particular item by the general public, thus resulting
in an unsold item.
EXAMPLE: Light shard at this exact moment costs 10 crowns for 1 shard.
If I ask 1000 or even 100 crowns for this item while there are people that sell them for 10 crowns nobody will buy my item,
because the pricing of others is much lower.

This is why before you put your items into auction ALWAYS check for theese items using the item search function of the auction house and look at other people 's pricing. A good and sellable price is usually 1%-10% under or above the average price people sell them for at that particular time. However you are free to sell them at whatever price you want and somtimes being a bit greedy helps keep the price to a nice average, meaning that we all essentially profit(yes you can profit from somone else's greed).

If you can manage to make your prices not too modest nor too greedy, you may see that others may join in into this action which in terms results in a reasonably solid and stable price for that particular item for long periods of time.
This more or less means that we can all profit on this middle ground, while not giving everyone sky high prices for their needs. (So in terms we all win this way)
And when the price is not too high nor too low you will see that people tend to buy your items rather easy even if somone sells theirs for lower prices. (usually consumers just buy both altough most dont realize this, or when they buy the cheaper item at some point during the day your item will be the cheapest and people will buy.)

In essence everyone can sell whatever they want at whatever price they like and it is totally fine to do so, I am not implying you sould play the game the way I described above, I am simply demonstrating my own method and through shear game experience have come to the conclusions that this method is somewhat functional and applies in the game.
And atleast for me this method is one of the things that has kept the game fun to play, and gives me a good feeling, because as explained above it does not only profit me but it gives oppertunities for others to profit aswell, which is good.

When you trade with people from player to player (so without the auction house), both parties will want to get a good deal.
For you this means a high price for the item you want to sell, for the other person a low price for the item he wants to buy.
Here you already start with a contradiction.

Usually this type of trade is made on a agreement for a final price between both players and therefore tends to be tricky, because the selling party may agree to a lower price if you ask or may dismiss the trade. This also means that the chance to sell items is decreased because the buying party (customer) can also dismiss or ignore your offer at any given
time they see fit.

At the Auction house, things lye a bit different. Firstly you have a bigger crowd. Why? Because the people that shout on the market square generally tend to sell expensive and/or specific items, while most of us require regular items such as swords/guns/bombs/helmets etc. and the prices from the market square tend to vary a lot.

Most players also check the auction house first before they look at the market square/(people infront of the auctionhouse) because usually every item you will need up until 4* can be bought at the auction house, and generally prices at the auction house are quite competitive, so you have a high chance that buying at the auction house will result in a good trade.

The other advantage is that you can set your auction up for up to 2 whole days meanning that while you are asleep for +/- 20 hours of those two days the auction house is still selling your items. So the chance to find somone to buy your items is even bigger, because you do not need to be physically there to trade the item. And as said in the guide at some point the cheapest items during the day are sold out and at that point your item is the cheapest and will likely sell.

Item forging it a bit riskier and generally more expensive than material trades. Its riskier because all the high value items of 3* cost 200 crystal
energy and 2500 crowns to make which is an initial investment of 18000 crowns(as of this point price of ce may value in the (future), and when you craft an item specifically for the auction house and set a good price it does not guarantee a sell.
This goes together with a high auction fee, +/- 10% of auction bid/buy price.
And most important of all if you are wanting to forge items as a beginning player you would mostly be dependent on 1, 2 or maybe 3 items at a time since 2* cost 50 energy to make. This means that you will most likely not have too many items to sell compared to materials trading.

Also it is good to understand that most players buy an item like a sword or gun once and then start upgrading it trough item forging/crafting so most player will not rebuy an item, while materials are gone when crafted so there is always a demand :).

If you however do wish to forge and sell items remember to always calculate the value in crowns put in + auction fee and compare this with the general price at that time in the auction house in order to get a good sence of what kind of profit you can expect.

General formula:

ITEM VALUE = COST OF ENERGY PUT IN + CRAFTING FEE + THEORETICAL MATERIAL VALUE

GENERAL PROFIT ITEM = AVERAGE AUCTION HOUSE PRICE - (ITEM VALUE + AUCTION FEE)

The first formula tells you what your item is worth in terms of crowns.
The second formula tells you what kind of theoretical profit you can expect.

1. First thing you need to do is play through some missions and levels in the clockworks to get a general feeing of what you can get from who(in terms of monster drops).

2. Gather materials as you usually do and don't sell materials to game vendors for they only give you 1-10 crowns per material (which is not worth it IMO). You will do yourself better if you keep the materials that won't sell now for times when prizesof those particular materials go up and it becomes profitable to sell them.

3. Do missions to get acces to end boss maps in order to get higher ACCUIRED CROWNS OF LEVEL profit and you would be more efficient if on a 3 stage boss run you get out of the clockworks after stage two. Why? Because bosses usually give about 250-500 crowns( Snarbolax, Jelly King and the Giant Mecha Puppy thing that is) which is worth less than 10 CE so if you don't need the tokens you can better save those 10 energy points, and use them for more runs :D! ( = more PROFIT)

4. ALWAYS CHECK ITEM PRIZES BEFORE YOU SELL ITEMS ON AUCTION!

5. Don't get discouraged if your items don't sell today mayb they will tomorrow!

6. If things start getting repetitive after a while because you follow the same pattern, lighten up :3, do some end boss runs in parties waste some energy ;3, and have fun, because at the end of the day this game is not about making tons of game money and feeling miserable repelled or tired, its about having fun and blowing things up :3.

So keep it that way and keep having fun with whatever you are doing :D!

I hope this guide was usefull to you and I wish you all well.