Transferred from paxdora.blogspot.com [LINK]
Original Post Date: 6/23/11

In RIFT, you can still make a little platinum by buying low and selling high but it can be quite tedious without mods to help you out.

One method I prefer is to organize AH results by "Time Left" and bid on items that are just about to expire. Crafting materials are the best, such as buying cloth and ore at their lowest (vendor) price. You only need to check the AH for new groups of expiring items every 1-2 hours since you will receive mail messages if you are undercut on the ones you have already bid for. I like to bid on items right before a shard reboot as well, it increases your chances of winning the item.

The other method is to buy items simply to vendor them. In WOW, there used to be a small profit to be made from buying low-cost bandage mats, and then vendoring for a profit. However, RIFT is a special case and large profit can be made from vendoring items that auction for less than their real value.

Search all AH items and organize by Unit Price. Then you mouse-over on each item to see what it vendors for, and compare to the Unit Price value. Bid or Buy Out any item that is being auctioned for less than the Vendor price.

In the following case, there is a profit to be made of 28s x 13 Celestite. This is not a lot so I usually target more expensive items but imagine 50-100 transactions per day giving you 1-50g per.

This occurs far more often than you can possibly realize. Some players are in a rush to auction multiple items, so they don't pay attention to the item's true (vendor) value. Others are in competition with other players and keep undercutting their prices, or they're sick and tired of an time not selling (especially runes) so they keep lowering it's price without realizing they can make more plat by just vendoring it.

The best items suitable for this method are gems, herbs (Krakenweed), Consumables (Potions), Runes, Scrolls & Armor Enhancements/Consumables, and Crafting Ingredients (like Pristine Femur and Hollow Bone). You can get the most bang for the buck with stackable items.

Each day, I can make 6-10p by just vendoring buy-out items. :)

It works better on larger population shards as well. On new shards, players are much more careful because they're more concerned about saving money.

Transferred from paxdora.blogspot.com [LINK]
Original Post Date: 6/21/11

Other than rune disenchants, there's a lot of plat to be made from selling artifacts. They especially sell better on PVP shards since opposing-faction artifacts are more difficult to obtain.

Puzzles and Cairns [LINK] are a nice way to make some platinum, but you can only do them once, and usually you'll want to keep the gear yourself if you're leveling. You need plat strategies that provide a sustainable income.

The fastest method to collect artifacts is by cheating (e.g. fly hacking) which I will cover later. This method, however, is completely legitimate and can be done at very early levels.

There are two artifacts on the top peaks of the Sanctum bridge that are often overlooked by the Guardians. I like to create level 7-10 Defiant's on multiple shards and run them to Sanctum, park them on top of the bridge, and then use Mighty Leap to jump back and forth from each side of the bridge. Remember when I said that the jumping skill was invaluable? :)

Here's a video of the location and how to get up the side of the bridge:


After you create a new Defiant character and leave the tutorial instance, remember that there's a fatigue zone all around the newbie zone. You can't simply swim across the water channel to the Guardian side. However, if you look on your map there's a small island North North East of your starting location. Head towards the long stretch of land until you're on the northern tip closest to the island, and then swim straight for the island. You'll fatigue yourself just a little bit, but you'll still be able to swim across. Then just swim towards Sanctum and watch out for NPC aggro (there's not much, most mobs are closer to land.)

After you reach the Sanctum bridge, just climb around the edge on the South side of the bridge and hop onto the main road leading into town. In the early mornings, no one is there.

You can easily jump onto the bridge from max distance and get on top of the bridge without ever aggroing the guards. Don't fall off though, it's a pain in the arse to start again from the beginning. Once you're above the guards, you never have to worry about them attacking you.

Then it's a simple matter of logging in and logging out throughout the day to collect the nice white, green, and blue artifacts that drop in those two locations on top of the bridge arcs.

Due to the difficult of obtaining the opposite faction artifacts, even many of the white artifacts can be sold for 1p a piece on the Defiant side. Once your bags are full, you can just let the guards kill you and you'll respawn at the training zone near Meridian.

Transferred from paxdora.blogspot.com [LINK]
Original Post Date: 6/16/11

This is a very easy method to gain plat, even at early levels.

Before I start though, I want to explain some prerequisites if you're serious about making RIFT Platinum. There are a few things you need to do first.

* All of your characters should be either a High Elf or Bahmi. Angelic Flight and Mighty Leap are INVALUABLE, I can't stress this enough. They're extremely useful for making plat and can get you out of tight situations like getting stuck. Time is money after all.
* Your MAIN character should be a Priest AOE build and should have all 3 gathering professions.
* Create a secondary MULE character that has Runecrafting, Outfitting, and Weaponsmithing. (As soon as you get out of your first training instance, run straight for Sanctuary or Meridian.)
* Your MAIN should always be mailing loot/mats to your MULE character for crafting purposes or selling on the AH.

I've leveled all classes to 50, and by the far the Priest is the fastest and most useful for collecting loot quickly. The Priest can also DPS, Heal and Tank.

As you're leveling your MAIN, simply send all of your gathered materials to your secondary character, have them construct cheap garments/weapons to level up and runebreak them. Most of your plat will be made from selling rune "disenchants". Don't waste your time with Runes (the "enchants"), there's very little plat to be made at low-med levels.

Alright, now that that's out of the way.. here's one simple strategy for making plat:

* There's always an imbalance of disenchant prices on the AH.

* If you have no plat, start out with Flickering Crystals (they sell for 2G or less ea), break them down, and sell the individual Flickering Powders for 50s each. That's a profit of 4.5g minus the 2g expense. Powders sell very well, and you can typically sell a dozen stacks per day (40-75g per stack).

* As you earn more gold/plat, use that as investments into more expensive disenchants and break them down (or upgrade the disenchants if the prices more favor that direction.)

* Familiarize yourself with the various levels of disenchants and how many mats you can collect by breaking them down.

Sentience Spark / Blast (5 Sparks) / Surge (15 Sparks)
Perpetual Blur / Glow (5 Blurs) / Flare (15 Blurs)
Kinetic Arc / Charge (5 Arcs) / Burst (15 Arcs)

There's always a vast difference in prices due to the imbalance of high/low leveled players.

For example, you can buy a Kinetic Burst for 40g, break it down, and resell the Arcs for 7g each giving you a profit of 1p 5g.

* Also very important, remember that you can TRANSMUTE one type of disenchant into another. You can convert between Bursts, Flares and Surges and all it costs is an additional Flickering Crystal which are very cheap. If a Kinetic Burst is selling for 80g, just purchase 40g Sentience Surges and convert them for profit.

* Always sell in large stacks and undercut your competition by a big amounts. Buyers will be hard pressed NOT to buy your disenchants due to their very reasonable prices.

* You will have a lot of competition, so make sure you're checking for undercuts every 30 minutes or so. You will need to cancel and re post your disenchants frequently, so I would recommend that you only post 1 or 2 of each Rune type.

I've played on over 10 servers (low-high population), and this strategy has been highly effective on all of them. I can typically make 30-40p per day just buying/selling disenchants and transmuting.

Here was another draft he had created a few days after his "Year of the Banhammer" blogspot.

So, yeah.. if you've been reading the blog for a while, you know I've been talking a lot about what to expect from Blizzard in 2011.

Because of decreasing WoW subscription growth and the expected lack of Activision Blizzard releases for the year, there's going to be a lot of cutbacks within the company and implementation of new paid services to increase revenue as much as possible (that have actually been planned for a long time, but were waiting for the right opportunity to deploy, like when revenues for the quarter were lower than expected) and before BlizzCon.

This isn't just for World of Warcraft, though, you can expect the same for their other line-up of games. Virtual items especially, and other paid services.

Shortly after posing this, Blizzard announced their new Winged Lion mount.

And then just 2 days after I mention "Maybe guild paid services?" they just announced Guild Paid Services. =]

Expect more. Virtual pets and mounts are good sellers, and they might even experiment with a price drop to see if they can increase demand for the item. Or the ever predictable tax-deductible charity approach. Perhaps a pet that will fit in with the lion or Egyptian theme?

How about "game breaking" items like a larger bag? (RIFT did it.) It probably won't be something to replace your default bag slot, though, but that's planned for all users in the future. A wise person would sell a larger/cool looking bag for $5 (to sell more of them, since everyone will want multiple) and announce that part of the proceeds will go to charity. It takes the sting off.

Maybe demon/elemental renaming services? Paid visual customizations of gear/clothes/items? Forum (or in-game) avatar customizations?

Cross-realm grouping or raiding? Their current Real ID feature is an easy way to implement this ability so that you can party with (PVP/Raiding) friends and family members.. for a price.

"Paid Un-Banning Services"? Pay to have a permanent ban changed to temporary ban (or have a really old account recovered) with the understanding that you'll play nice moving forwards (and monitored more closely during their probation period). If you work in Blizzard marketing, pay close attention to this. It sounds absolutely crazy, but it works and with little investment. =]

There are a lot of possibilities.

One thing is certain however, they have already made promises and commitments to WoW microtransactions (e.g. that they won't be game-breaking) but they haven't made any promises in regards to their other games.

Their Next-Gen MMO will probably take great liberties and flex "Blizzard ethics", and I can definitely foresee game-breaking transactions available in future titles. This shouldn't surprise you though, this is just the way Blizzard is heading and they've made all of the signs and trends quite obvious.

Flame on.