Crafting vs. Cartel Market Item Sales: I Turned 171M In-Game Credits into 2892.9M in 6 Weeks to Determine Which Method was Best and Most Efficient

[Gebrakstkasten]

Summary:  After returning from more than 3 years I thought that it would be interesting to see how much cash I could make in a single subscription period.  I limited the duration to 6 weeks because I needed some time to put this together.  The three main credit making categories I counted were normal game play get cash, crafting, and selling Cartel Market (CM) items:  Which is the most effective and which is the best?  I found I could make money quicker in the CM, but it is very time consuming so crafting is really the best because it is a somewhat passive activity.  Playing the game actually cost credits because I wasn’t doing hardly any missions and had companions out almost constantly.

Background:  Initially, I thought it would be better to start with a brand-new account, but decided on using my existing account because most people who might read this have probably been playing for a while.  Furthermore, it would be very difficult to compare crafting and CM item sales in this amount of time if I needed to build the crafting skills and companion ranks from scratch.  Additional I started with a large assortment of crafting materials (mats) 6 Cartel Market (CM) items ready to sell and $171M in credits.  It does take money to make money. 

Objectives:  Given 6 weeks, actively pursue earning in game credits through game play, crafting, and selling CM items on GTN.  Credits earned were initially broken into 4 categories:

0 – Starting Amount:  This is the $171M

1 – CM Items:  These are items that originate from the CM, but can be bought and sold on the GTN.

2 – Crafting:  Items created from materials by companions to be sold on the GTN. 

3 – Gameplay:  Cash earned and spent in game for any activity. 

 

Observations:  At the end of 6 weeks, I netted $1787.9M after the GTN tax.  Adding category 1 and 2 I made $1858.011M, but in-game play cost me -$70.111M so the actual total number earned was $1787.9M. 

1 – CM Items:                    $1120.93 M

2 – Crafting:                        $737.081 M

3 – Gameplay:                   -$70.111 M

 

Category 1 – CM Items:  This currency was made by selling 14 CM items obtained partially through purchase in the GTN and with old items on hand.  The GTN was used for all sales and purchases.  Spent a total of $559M for CM items for the expressed purpose of selling.  The purchase range was from $1M – $500M, but most of the items bought were in single digits.  The most profitable sale was a purchase for $9M and net sale for $305M. This range seemed to be the sweet spot for ability to both buy and sell with a markup.

This activity was very time consuming.  It required pen and paper to track and make good value estimates.  Part of this method required building the inventory of goods to sell.  Had I continued, I think I could have doubled again in the same amount of time using the 17 remaining CM items and cash on hand to continue to search for underpriced CM items to sell for a profit.

Category 2 – Crafting:  Unlike the research-intensive CM approach, this method was relatively easy and only required keeping companions on missions to gather and craft.  After determining what was selling, I able to focus on those items and the necessary mats.  Factors for consideration were the availability of the mats, how quickly the items sold, and how much they could sell for.  There was a ready market to sell crafted items from each of the 6 disciplines.  I ended up starting with 6 characters, but eventually paired it down to the 2 that were making the most profitable items. 

Category 3.  While in the game environment, most of the activity was limited to crafting, sending companions on missions, and working and researching on the GTN.  Placing 7 companions on gathering missions for LV11 items costs about $47k each rotation.  This is how I account for the negative number.  There were also thousands of mats left over; however, not calculated in this. 

There are two other important factors that should be mentioned:  Left over CM items and crafted items that were ready to sell.  Below are estimates of the income, but the sales data supports these assigned values.  For this I developed categories 5 and 6 as potential currency as follows:

Category 4 - CM Potential. There were 17 items still in the account purchased at below estimated costs.  After looking at market value, $528M is what I think I could reasonably receive from those items. 

4 – CM Potential: $528M. 

Category 5 – Crafting Potential.  This is a collection of crafted items that are still in the account ready to be sold at fair market value.  This does not take into account the materials that were gathered.

5 – Crafting Potential: $577M. 

Adding up categories 1-5 the total figure is $1787.9M + $1105M = $2892.9M of currency made and potential currency. 

Limitations:

1 - This date was collected with a notebook and excel spreadsheet and not game logs so there are probably errors in the observations. 

2 – Did not collect specifics on the income earned and spend during normal gameplay.  The $70M deficit was a surprise.

 

Conclusion:  Crafting defiantly required the least amount of time and focus, but did not have the rewards.  Had this experiment continued, the potential was there to have an even greater gap between the amounts made from crafting vs selling CM items.  Overall, there is a lot of cash to be made from either, but like everything else in this game it comes down to what you want to put your time into. 

Key observation is the in game economy is too inflated and the GTN’s current $1 billion credit limit is too low.  Couple recommendations to fix: 

1 – Raise GTN purchases to $10 billion. 

2 – Develop other ways to spend cash like selling more weapons, skins, mounts stronghold items, etc.  The expanded interface makes it now possible to have multiple sets of armor and stats.  This will probably create some further demand for spending, but not sure if it goes far enough.

3 – Ability to keep things on the GTN for 5 days.  There are pros and cons to this, but I think it will eventually keep prices down for consumers.

 

Final Thoughts for Players:  If you have a mature account where you have been collecting stuff for years it might be time to have a garage sale.  When I left there was a lot of concern of a shrinking player base.  I think one way to keep folks around would be to have a more robust GTN with more items, increased selection, and at reduced prices.  Same is true for crafting.  The more people crafting, the more availability and lower prices for stat improvement items. 

[Ardrossan]

 It's so often difficult for players to provide more than opinions about the state of the economy since we don't have actual data, but this comes closer than anything else i've seen. I like that it reads like an actual study abstract, very cool. 

What types of CM items did you find were most profitable? Consumables? Packs? Dyes? What was the item you bought for 9M and sold for 305M? Can you give some further clarification on the difference in length of time between Categories 1 vs 2? Can you clarify roughly how many hours per 'rotation' (or per week) in the one-month sub period you spent on this experiment?

Typically for me, crafting is quite time-intensive, so it makes me wonder how much longer Category 1 must be. I've also often noticed that selling mats can sometimes be faster than selling crafted items, especially for artifact mats. 

I encourage players to rate this important thread highly to bring to the attention of @JackieKo and bioware. 

[Gebrakstkasten]

Thanks for the encouragement and the post. 

What types of CM items did you find were most profitable? 

I started with a wide array of items, but ended up focusing on augs at the 45 and 73 levels and MK10s and 11s.  The factors to keep in mind are availability of mats, speed of sale, and market price.  No surprise, everyone needs augs.  To get the highest quality mats you really have to play the game and I wasn't really playing the necessary end game content or conquest grinding during this time period.  

I focused on armor sets for CM items.  Its a lot of information to try and understand each category of sale in the GTN so I got smart on armor sets.  The high profit item was the Exquisite Dancer armor set.  Sith badass and bikini armor were the hot categories from my experience.

Can you give some further clarification on the difference in length of time between Categories 1 vs 2?

When I started I used a stopwatch to answer this specific question, but then I forgot after a long session so sadly I didn't collect any data on that.  What I can say is crafting is more of a background activity and the more you do it the quicker and less intrusive to other gameplay it gets.  You can put the companions on gathering missions and either go to another character and put them on missions or do a PvP match, FP, or play with the new character interface, or anything else because gathering missions are about a 20 min cooldown where you do nothing.  You can do it in the middle of soloing, in a FP, or capping in a warzone ... yeah I'm that guy.  When your on the GTN it takes 100% focus.  I had to make a log of everything I was buying and selling and keep track of costs.  I have a note book full of the armor sets and what I payed and estimated value.  

 

 

[xordevoreaux]

On 4/29/2023 at 11:57 AM, Gebrakstkasten said:

1 – Raise GTN purchases to $10 billion. 

When in-game inflation catches up to this figure of 10 billion credits, people will demand a cap of 50 billion, and then 100 billion, as the value of a credit continues to evaporate.

There is no final cap on this to stay out of reach of inflation tacking on zeroes to transactions.

[TrixxieTriss]

I found it interesting that you thought CM selling on the GTN was more time consuming than actually getting mats, crafting & then selling them on the GTN.

That actually makes no sense because CM items only need to be listed. Where as you need to actually spend time gathering mats or sending on missions & crafting items, then listing on the GTN. 

If you’re talking about GTN flip trading where you scroll through looking for cheap items & relisting them, then why wouldn’t you just do that while you’re crafting at the same time 🤷🏻‍♀️.

I actually made my Billions from doing both & that was before the inflation pressures pushed crafted dyes above 100k (my bread & butter). I’ve not actually purchased anything directly from the CM to sell for several years. 

Crafting & selling is how you make bank. Once you’ve got a billion under your belt you can really start flipping the CM items more. But seeing as most of the highest CM items are now sold outside of the GTN because of the 1 billion cap, I find it’s actually more profitable to just sell & flip crafted items if you only want to use the GTN.

[TrixxieTriss]

39 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

When in-game inflation catches up to this figure of 10 billion credits, people will demand a cap of 50 billion, and then 100 billion, as the value of a credit continues to evaporate.

There is no final cap on this to stay out of reach of inflation tacking on zeroes to transactions.

There is if BioWare close the tax avoidance loopholes 

[ZUHFB]

sale raids make more than this 20 minutes, just fyi

[xordevoreaux]

8 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

There is if BioWare close the tax avoidance loopholes 

That does zero to stop the overprinting of money in the first place.

[TrixxieTriss]

2 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

That does zero to stop the overprinting of money in the first place.

True, but they’ve already fixed that. So as long as they keep an eye on that, then inflation will stop & actually start to reverse.

[Gebrakstkasten]

20 hours ago, xordevoreaux said:

When in-game inflation catches up to this figure of 10 billion credits, people will demand a cap of 50 billion, and then 100 billion, as the value of a credit continues to evaporate.

There is no final cap on this to stay out of reach of inflation tacking on zeroes to transactions.

Why not?  The currency cap isn't like the deficit cap debate in the US where it actually has adverse economic impacts.  I don't understand the issue in SWTOR, my computer can count past 100 billion just fine.  

How do other games handle this?  Interesting because as the inflation goes up the actual value goes up as well unlike the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 where houses were over valued and the crash happened.  This isn't a bubble, its the true value because the market supports.  

WoW must have faced this problem, anyone know what they did?

[xordevoreaux]

1 hour ago, Gebrakstkasten said:

How do other games handle this? 

They don't. In Everquest 2, time was when 100 plat was a LOT of money. Now you'll need hundreds of thousands of plat just to buy moderately decent gear off the player exchange system.

[cach-x]

You can only apply real-life economic principals to a videogame up to a certain point because of the fact that in games both money and resources are unlimited.

You can always complete missions and receive more money, you can always loot more money, you can gather goods potentially forever with no limits other than time. Money and resources are created from nothing, which means that every player is creating a "government is printing more money" effect.

There are some ways to relieve the pressure, but you can't really get totally rid of the inflation.

Some games create "status items" that only the super wealthy can afford, like golden mounts and such.

[Gebrakstkasten]

On 5/1/2023 at 12:21 AM, TrixxieTriss said:

I found it interesting that you thought CM selling on the GTN was more time consuming than actually getting mats, crafting & then selling them on the GTN.

That actually makes no sense because CM items only need to be listed. Where as you need to actually spend time gathering mats or sending on missions & crafting items, then listing on the GTN. 

If you’re talking about GTN flip trading where you scroll through looking for cheap items & relisting them, then why wouldn’t you just do that while you’re crafting at the same time 🤷🏻‍♀️.

 

Couple points:

1 - You can craft and do almost any other game content:  FPs, PvP, questing, and scrolling on the GTN.  Once your companions come back you can send them out again no matter what you’re doing.  If you’re on the GTN trying to estimate value you can't do any other activity... except craft. 

2 – I get your point:  You can put items on the GTN for 3 days, forget about it, and either cash in or get your money back.  After I got familiar with my inventory and generally had a sense on what price to ask for that did save some time.  However, prior to posting, I still had to see what other people were asking to determine my own asking price regardless of what I thought the item was worth.  I made a profit overall, but also got stuck overpaying for some items.  So, from my experience, as someone who didn’t have a good preconception of CM item valuation, it was a bit of a grind hr-wise recording the items to find an asking price that would sell for a profit.  The experience was also time consuming in overall duration because the asking prices fluctuated throughout the 6-week period. 

[TrixxieTriss]

6 hours ago, Gebrakstkasten said:

Couple points:

1 - You can craft and do almost any other game content:  FPs, PvP, questing, and scrolling on the GTN.  Once your companions come back you can send them out again no matter what you’re doing.  If you’re on the GTN trying to estimate value you can't do any other activity... except craft. 

2 – I get your point:  You can put items on the GTN for 3 days, forget about it, and either cash in or get your money back.  After I got familiar with my inventory and generally had a sense on what price to ask for that did save some time.  However, prior to posting, I still had to see what other people were asking to determine my own asking price regardless of what I thought the item was worth.  I made a profit overall, but also got stuck overpaying for some items.  So, from my experience, as someone who didn’t have a good preconception of CM item valuation, it was a bit of a grind hr-wise recording the items to find an asking price that would sell for a profit.  The experience was also time consuming in overall duration because the asking prices fluctuated throughout the 6-week period. 

Yep, you can definitely do most anything  while crafting. Except maybe HM Pve or pvp content. The point was, if you are GTN browsing to flip & list, that’s actually a really great time to do it.

A couple of points on how you can do this the most efficiently. So that you have everything at your fingertips without needing to leave your SH. I use my Korriban SH for this, but you could use any. 

Craft or obtain the following SH decorations: Personal Cargo Hold, Legacy Cargo Hold, Guild Cargo Hold, mail box, GTN wall deco & 1 each of the Jawa Junk vendors (3 total). 
I set mine in the first room so I don’t have to run any where once I enter the SH.

The Jawa vendors are in case you need extra mats that you may run out of & you can use certain crafting currencies to convert to mats. 

You’ve probably done the hardest part already, which is identifying certain high volume crafted items that sell at excellent profit margins. So this is for any newbies. Look for items that you think should sell well. Once you’ve identified those. Concentrate on mostly making those. But the bigger selection you have, the more likely you’ll have a continued high income from crafting. Personally I chose dyes as my go to crafting items. With a few decorations thrown in for diversity. 

The other thing you want to do as a subscriber is to pick 6 companions you want to craft/farm with. Get these companions to lvl 50 influence as they will do everything so much faster, but will also crit on your crafted items regularly & make 2 instead of 1. 
 

One last thing, you can get decorations SH that are farmable mats you can get without leaving your SH. Because I do dyes, and have a large collection of coloured crystals all through my SH. Every few hours, you can farm 1-5 deco’s per character (it’s random). The more alts you have, the more you can farm. I’ve over 50 alts, so I can get a lot of these free mats by switching alts. I also set up the majority of my alts professions as farmers & not crafters. That way I can just rotate through them between crafting & farm all the mats I need without ever needing to leave the SH. 

Anyway, hope this setup helps others looking for the most efficient, low effort way to craft & make credits on the GTN.

[Gebrakstkasten]

Thanks you all for the thoughtful feedback and conversation.  I learned a lot and didn't know about the credit caps and some of the other issues surrounding the GTN and in game currency currency.  My sub runs out and I think I'm done with SWTOR for a bit.  The only reason I came back was to do this experiment and make this post.  If you haven't done so already I would recommend posting on the dev post:

 7.3 CREDIT ECONOMY INITIATIVE: UPDATES AND THE GTN  

Thanks again.  

Edited May 8, 2023 by Gebrakstkasten