I'm talking about RIGs separately because they are absolutely rich for making profits off of, even if you don't have much capital yet. I'm not talking about investing in the RIGs themselves - as I've mentioned in previous parts, that's for when you have the capital to spare. (And there are lots and lots of good threads about that already in this guild.)

I'm talking about vending and making a short term profit off the items themselves.

The low hanging fruit of RIGs are the loser items with a store sellback value. Most of them suck on some level and since there are more losers than winners, there are lots of these items that most players don't want to keep. So the players price them to sell in the MP - often below sellback value. No, I don't know why, but it happens.

If you can find one of these items below sellback value, it's risk-free instant profit. It's about the only risk-free MP transaction there is. You can turn that item around and free up your capital in about 15 seconds. (If an item has a sellback value and your regular inventory doesn't give you a "sell" button when you click on it, go to your Inventory Arranger, highlight the item, and click "sell" above. It'll give you the sell back to the store dialog.)

So when a new RIG comes out, the first thing I do is figure out which items are the loser items, and memorize their sellback values. No, they don't all have the same sellback value. That would make it easy.

So what's the downside? Everyone and his brother is after these items because they are easy gold. So plan to lose at least 9 out of 10 of the ones you try for. That's still no reason not to go after them - someone has to win them, and sometimes it's going to be you.

One other caveat: sometimes, especially in the hours right after a RIG is released, these items are still selling in the MP above their store sellback value. It's worth checking that out before selling back to the store, because you might make more in the MP. Even if it doesn't sell at the higher price, you can always cancel the listing and sell it to the store at any time.

The other items to watch are the middle items - they're not the ultra rares, but they're not the loser items. Some have store sellback; some don't. For these, it's not so much the sellback as the wild variation in prices that people are selling them at in the first day or so after a RIG is out, before prices stabilize.

You can often pick up items selling for 100K or more less than the next lowest price....and that gives you lots of room to change the price should it start dropping before yours sells. But again, you need to know what these items are and what prices people who can't wait until prices have stabilized are actually paying for these items.

I won't say it's not risky because it is. There are also great rewards to be reaped. You have to decide if you have the resources and the tolerance to play around with these items. My advice is don't do anything that would keep you awake at night. No game economy is worth that.

I stayed away from the high end/rare items because 1. it's too much capital tied up in one item when I had only so much gold and 2. their prices are ridiculously volatile.

I was able to be around for only a couple of hours for the last two RIG releases (real life and all), but I was still able to vend about 500K's worth of profit on my mule. The numbers are to show I'm walking my talk here.

There's one more opportunity to watch out for when a new RIG is released: mispriced older items. Not only are people dumping older stuff to buy the new RIG items, they often are overlooked in the chaos of the MP, making them somewhat easier to buy. If you're buying to invest or can afford the potential day or three wait for prices to restabilize (which is often not necessary), these can be very good for relatively short term profit.