Meet the 5-time PL Champion, Free-to-Play Gold Saucer Wonder Squares + AMA

[Westheim]

I take from this thread that everything I do in OOTP is wrong, has always been wrong, and will always be wrong...

[mcdog512]

Originally Posted by Westheim

I take from this thread that everything I do in OOTP is wrong, has always been wrong, and will always be wrong...

Nah, we're here to have fun....some people find fun in different ways. F'ing around in the auction house sounds like a bad use of my limited time.

[neugey]

My goodness that is quite a god squad for a F2P team. If I had flipping skill like that I'd probably take my talents to Wall Street.

[Argonaut]

I have the Gold Saucer music playing in my head thanks to this thread. Man, that game was a classic.

I got a chance to participate in some Auction House madness for the 1st time this Collection Monday. I definitely believe there's some serious PP to be made if you're flipping mission pieces. Good on you for assembling an elite team by doing so.

If you're the guy that continuously lists Diamond A-Rod and Cordero for ~40k PP though, I take back my kind words!

[ElementalKnight]

Originally Posted by Westheim

I take from this thread that everything I do in OOTP is wrong, has always been wrong, and will always be wrong...

Haha, it's only right or wrong relative to what your goals are. Like others have said, there are lots of ways to play this game, and that's something really cool about it.

Originally Posted by Argonaut

I have the Gold Saucer music playing in my head thanks to this thread. Man, that game was a classic.

I got a chance to participate in some Auction House madness for the 1st time this Collection Monday. I definitely believe there's some serious PP to be made if you're flipping mission pieces. Good on you for assembling an elite team by doing so.

If you're the guy that continuously lists Diamond A-Rod and Cordero for ~40k PP though, I take back my kind words!

You should be thankful to A-Rod guy, because I would have had Cordero up at 50k perpetually if not for them

If you liked FF7, you might like my fictional league. I'll post the team names, divisions, and such in here a bit later.

[ElementalKnight]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ERcYlxWx8U

Have at it!

[ElementalKnight]

Some random things about me: I was a theoretical math undergrad. I went to law school and worked as a lawyer for four years. I went back to school and got a Master of Environmental Management degree, and now I'm a PhD student in environmental studies studying environmental ethics and policy, particularly related to geoengineering.

Here are the divisions from my Final Fantasy + World of Warcraft fictional league:




One subleague for FF teams, with divisions for 7, 10, 12, and 13. One subleague for WoW teams, based more on geography and expansions. Each team has five minor league teams related in theme to their big league team. First round draft picks for each team are renamed after major characters from that game and/or place. The customizability of OOTP is what drew me in in the first place.

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by Argonaut

If you're the guy that continuously lists Diamond A-Rod and Cordero for ~40k PP though, I take back my kind words!

Save your nasty words for the rubes who buy the cards at the inflated prices and wreck the averages...

[Argonaut]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Save your nasty words for the rubes who buy the cards at the inflated prices and wreck the averages...

I got my Cordero for 25k which I'm glad for after reading this thread. Definitely learned to quickly buy any reasonably priced mission pieces before the snipers get them!

[ElementalKnight]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Save your nasty words for the rubes who buy the cards at the inflated prices and wreck the averages...

It seems like they've done something recently that makes the last 7 price less responsive to outlier purchases. That only helps me when it comes to flipping collection pieces. I love seeing low last 7 prices on pieces I know will move for much more. I'm sure they'll change this eventually, but it's great for now.

Originally Posted by Argonaut

I got my Cordero for 25k which I'm glad for after reading this thread. Definitely learned to quickly buy any reasonably priced mission pieces before the snipers get them!

Congrats to you! I certainly don't catch everything. But I definitely think it's wise to snatch a collection piece up quickly if it's at a price you're willing to pay.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by ElementalKnight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ERcYlxWx8U

Have at it!

I surrender. I did not watch every page, so I can't verify that you never spent money. BUT, after watching many, many pages of transactions, I believe your claims. I apologize for my skeptical attitude.

I could not have done what you did. First of all, I sleep more than 4-5 hours per night. I spend time doing other things, like mowing my yard and watching sports, and I don't have the game in front of me while I do them. I can't execute 50 activities at one time, which you obviously can. I don't have the patience to bid 5pp on literally every iron card listed all day long and then sell them for 15pp until I accumulate enough to start buying bronze. You had more transactions in March and April than I have total today.

I wouldn't have believed that, THIS WEEK, you could buy a 2014 HH Kluber card for 18K and sell it 4 hours later for 31K. I did not believe that the market was that wild, but now I do.

Missions certainly helped you because you likely had all of the cards to complete the White Sox missions several times. Selling the extras brought in enough points to move you into speculating on historical diamonds and perfects. It was still amazing to see you buying dozens of expensive cards within minutes and selling dozens at the same time. There must have been profit there, but frankly even tracking it was beyond my patience level.

I tip my hat to you and agree that your skills are unique. I couldn't do it, and - please don't take this the wrong way - I wouldn't want to do it.

To the people that say he should take his skills to the stock market, he isn't playing against machines here. The stock market is not filled with fools. Computers control trading there. Yes, he could make money as a day trader, but he could just as easily hold three online jobs at the same time and make more. Hell, he could probably do the day trading too.

[dkgo]

the stock market is completely different. Its not like you can find shares of home depot for 50% off just by looking at the right time lol.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by Orcin

To the people that say he should take his skills to the stock market, he isn't playing against machines here. The stock market is not filled with fools. Computers control trading there. Yes, he could make money as a day trader, but he could just as easily hold three online jobs at the same time and make more. Hell, he could probably do the day trading too.

MMOs are a fundamentally different breed of economy though, filled with market efficiencies because making money isn't the primary objective of the markets for most people, and the number of traders who have more information than the public is very small. In stocks/crypto/whatever, people ONLY care about making money, so it's a very different world. It'd be like spending an entire day trying to buy irons for 13 PP and selling it for 15 PP, competing against a thousand others who are doing the same thing. But even then you're hopeless because half of those thousands of traders have another thousand computers monitoring every PT game at once, constantly determining if they could try to sell a few of those irons for 16 or 17 PP instead.

That doesn't mean the dedication here isn't impressive or skillful. It's just a "if you put in the time, it's there for you" kind of world, rather than "if you put in the time AND have a dozen other advantages, you could make 1% in a week" world.

[ElementalKnight]

Originally Posted by Orcin

I surrender. I did not watch every page, so I can't verify that you never spent money. BUT, after watching many, many pages of transactions, I believe your claims. I apologize for my skeptical attitude.

I could not have done what you did. First of all, I sleep more than 4-5 hours per night. I spend time doing other things, like mowing my yard and watching sports, and I don't have the game in front of me while I do them. I can't execute 50 activities at one time, which you obviously can. I don't have the patience to bid 5pp on literally every iron card listed all day long and then sell them for 15pp until I accumulate enough to start buying bronze. You had more transactions in March and April than I have total today.

I wouldn't have believed that, THIS WEEK, you could buy a 2014 HH Kluber card for 18K and sell it 4 hours later for 31K. I did not believe that the market was that wild, but now I do.

Missions certainly helped you because you likely had all of the cards to complete the White Sox missions several times. Selling the extras brought in enough points to move you into speculating on historical diamonds and perfects. It was still amazing to see you buying dozens of expensive cards within minutes and selling dozens at the same time. There must have been profit there, but frankly even tracking it was beyond my patience level.

I tip my hat to you and agree that your skills are unique. I couldn't do it, and - please don't take this the wrong way - I wouldn't want to do it.

To the people that say he should take his skills to the stock market, he isn't playing against machines here. The stock market is not filled with fools. Computers control trading there. Yes, he could make money as a day trader, but he could just as easily hold three online jobs at the same time and make more. Hell, he could probably do the day trading too.

Thanks for the kind words, Orcin, and no worries at all. I completely understand anyone being skeptical here.

I also don't blame anyone else for not wanting to do this sort of thing. Academic reading and writing has me in front of the computer a lot, and my brain is weird, so it works out.

I have no idea what it's actually called, but I call it "floorscraping" when I bid on things like irons at the minimum. I liked the idea of it because it's zero risk and I could use small amounts of residual PP to do it. It turned out not to be particularly lucrative, but it added a ton of entries to the transaction history, so it's a little deceptive in the video. Historical silvers carried the day early on. In addition to my searches, early on I definitely did a few sweeps each day of the sum total of historical silvers looking for good deals.

The market is way wilder than most people understand. I went back and found my favorite set of transactions of all time, because it made me legit laugh out loud when it happened. This is gold Faber:



I needed Faber at that point, and he more than paid for himself in literally one minute. That first day of collections is some of craziest stuff I've ever seen in online markets. It was super fun.

When the White Sox missions launched, I think I was like two short on basically all the missions. I got Walsh done that first night, and I flipped enough pieces to complete those missions several times over. Being a White Sox fan in real life helped, because I had better coverage for them than I had for most teams.

Everyone's right about how the real stock market is different. That's never held any interest for me.

Part of why I've chosen to talk about this is to show that there really are a lot of market opportunities out there if you're interested. But no one should feel like they're missing out if doing this sort of thing isn't fun for them.

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by ElementalKnight

Some random things about me: I was a theoretical math undergrad. I went to law school and worked as a lawyer for four years. I went back to school and got a Master of Environmental Management degree, and now I'm a PhD student in environmental studies studying environmental ethics and policy, particularly related to geoengineering.

Here are the divisions from my Final Fantasy + World of Warcraft fictional league:




One subleague for FF teams, with divisions for 7, 10, 12, and 13. One subleague for WoW teams, based more on geography and expansions. Each team has five minor league teams related in theme to their big league team. First round draft picks for each team are renamed after major characters from that game and/or place. The customizability of OOTP is what drew me in in the first place.

Needs more teams from the earlier Final Fantasy games. Where are my Baron Red Wings?

[ElementalKnight]

Originally Posted by Magus978

Needs more teams from the earlier Final Fantasy games. Where are my Baron Red Wings?

Haha, 4 and 6 are great games, but I'm really partial to the worlds and geography of some of the later games. 12 gets some serious, justifiable criticism, but I adore the locations, names, and landscapes. I should put some time into thinking about what the teams in an FF4 division and FF6 division would look like. The Baron Red Wings would definitely be in there

[Dogberry99]

What you call floorscraping has often crossed my mind as a viable means to build up points with minimal risk over time. This is how my primary collection team has amassed a surprising amount of its live cards even...

However, the biggest reason I never went for this strategy (aside from time) is that my computer would melt from the continual restarts this game and its memory leaks would force upon me. The market itself isn't an issue, but the interactive roster page... Well, let's just say it doesn't stay interactive for as long as I'd like

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by ElementalKnight

Some random things about me: I was a theoretical math undergrad. I went to law school and worked as a lawyer for four years. I went back to school and got a Master of Environmental Management degree, and now I'm a PhD student in environmental studies studying environmental ethics and policy, particularly related to geoengineering.

Here are the divisions from my Final Fantasy + World of Warcraft fictional league:




One subleague for FF teams, with divisions for 7, 10, 12, and 13. One subleague for WoW teams, based more on geography and expansions. Each team has five minor league teams related in theme to their big league team. First round draft picks for each team are renamed after major characters from that game and/or place. The customizability of OOTP is what drew me in in the first place.

Holy cow. That’s awesome. Do you play Hearthstone? For Wow there are auction mods which really help making gold. Too bad they don’t have that for this game.

[ElementalKnight]

Originally Posted by Dogberry99

What you call floorscraping has often crossed my mind as a viable means to build up points with minimal risk over time. This is how my primary collection team has amassed a surprising amount of its live cards even...

However, the biggest reason I never went for this strategy (aside from time) is that my computer would melt from the continual restarts this game and its memory leaks would force upon me. The market itself isn't an issue, but the interactive roster page... Well, let's just say it doesn't stay interactive for as long as I'd like

I have no doubt that this is a viable strategy for some people, and the zero risk aspect really is compelling. But I'm with you on the slowdown. I don't have nearly as many cards as some people, but when I first started playing, auction and roster stuff was lightning quick. Now, it takes 5–10 seconds to cancel an auction. I hope they prioritize optimizing the game for those with many cards, because it's been another deterrent to me having a lot of listings.

Originally Posted by OMGPuppies

Holy cow. That’s awesome. Do you play Hearthstone? For Wow there are auction mods which really help making gold. Too bad they don’t have that for this game.

Thanks! I played Hearthstone actively from late in the beta until Kobolds and Catacombs or so. Loved the game. I played mostly Rogue (which I also played in WoW) and some Shaman. I still pop in every so often to play the single player stuff. I've really liked what they've done since and including Dungeon Run. I also still watch Kripp streams from time to time. I assume you play? What do you like?

If this game had TradeSkillMaster, you'd all be doomed, just saying What I did in WoW was arguably more absurd than what I've done here. I basically took over and monopolized the jewelcrafting industry on my server (as Alliance on a Horde-dominated PvP server), and I farmed all my materials and recipes as well. I played the margins a lot more there. My chief market rival had a meltdown where he told me he was an army vet who was going to find out where I lived and beat me. That's when I really knew I had won

[Stick50]

Ok so one of the basic strategies here is... "buy low/sell hi"... simple enough right

So here are my 2 questions...

1- With... 600+?? live cards (and 2k plus cards total?) how in the world are you able to identify a "good deal" that quickly? Do you have all the ... current... prices memorized?

2- How many cards do you have any any given time? I often find myself selling off 40's and 50's as they tend to clog things up. This is obviously the wrong way to do things (by me)