Greedy Goblin

Monday, March 27, 2017

Albion: my great horse business

So far it seems I'm staying in Albion Online. If you want to try it out, here is my referral link! Warning: The game is still in beta, so it can change. "Change" in video game development is a politically correct term for "nerfed to the ground to cater to paying morons and slackers". Continue on your own risk, don't blame me! The game currently looks the most fitting to the "player can make an impact on the game world" hope. This promotional video tells what the game is promised to be. Of course there is a chance that it will become a "get everything from running piss-easy instanced dungeons", but one can hope.

Every Albion Online guide to "get rich fast at game start" says: grind like crazy to get enough money to buy your island (it's an instanced farm), plant carrots. The carrots take a day to grow. While waiting, grind some insane crazy more for the next island upgrade and to be able to pay for the foals. During farming you must buy seed from NPC for silver and plant it. Foals are the "seeds" of riding horses. When the carrots grew, harvest them, you get farming skill that allows you to "plant" the foals. They need the carrots as food to grow. The next day you can harvest the horses and sell them for a fortune. You can plant ox calves instead of horse foals to get transport oxes.

Of course that isn't what I did. At first I started days after the servers came online, by the time most people had their horses and many farms were operational creating horses. Secondly, when everyone is farming horses, you shouldn't be farming horses, you should be trading horses! Let's look at the map:

The southern continent is the "Royal", where the zones are either completely safe (blue), or limited PvP (yellow, red), where killing players costs you reputation which will lock you out of cities. The black dot is Caerleon, a safe city in the middle of red zones and we don't care about it for the moment.

The green dots are NPC cities where players can trade. The private island teleports are here. You can use instant travel between these cities for a small fee. The red dots are starter towns. You can instant travel between them too, for a larger fee, but you must travel on foot between towns and cities. So the horse breeders listed their horses in the cities. Some traders arbitraged between the cities using fast travel. What people ignored were the starting towns. Probably because starting towns have newbies who can't afford a horse.

Except they bought gold for $, they traded the gold for silver and didn't even know of the cities and wanted horses and oxes now. So I started buying horses in the cities and moved them to the towns. Fast forward Saturday: 2M cash and 100 horses and oxes listed in towns.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you expect that this method will be valid when the game releases?

I think it will be, but maybe not in the long term (as most players will join the game in the first few months)

Gevlon said...

Trading is always valid. Granted it's possible that in late game the T3 horses won't be that expensive and probably I have to find some new income source.

Anonymous said...

Now that I am more casual than ever I will try trading too. I am really looking forward to Albion Online and Crowfall.

I have a few questions: You always posted exact methods about your trading activities, so anyone could copy them.
If I start trading, my main concern is not that I won't be able to do what you do, but that when you write about it, that part of the market will collapse/be more competitive, because your readerbase will apply them.

So I would be really interested in some articles, how you get the ideas where/when and what to trade. And not just ideas, but any methodical activities which result in knowledge about market.
Maybe most of us are not really good at finding these market opportunities, and you could write about how you find them, because I guess it is not always like this:
"I think this could work, let's see!"

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: I'm running a measurement right now and will be a post on Friday or Thursday about it. That's the "scientific" way.

But the simple way is:
- I needed a horse for myself
- I found it too expensive and looked some other place
- Found it much cheaper.
- I ended up selling my horse on the first location and bought a new one on the second.

Anonymous said...

I have 1 question. If you have unlimited amount of game gold and silver, how you can spend it meaningful way in albion?

Gevlon said...

I don't know yet. The game is beta, endgame is being formulated and I'm playing for a week.

Hanura H'arasch said...

@Anonymous: Well, anecdotally, I've been supplying horses and oxes to Forest Cross as well, and they sell faster than my buy orders fill. With a margin of 100%.

And that is just one tiny section of the market. There are ample trading opportunities if you're simply willing to look. It doesn't take much to open up a spreadsheet, travel from town to town and look up local prices.

Looch said...

Demand scales with player's tier progression. T3 horse is something EVERYBODY needs at beta start ... today the market already dropped to like 5k sell / 2k buy. Still, noob cities sells at 8k to latecomers or alts.
While market will stabilize to T5/6 there will always be certain items in high demand. Follow the tide until it lasts!


$$$>Gold>Silver is a market per se. While you get free gold because of beta and packages, many people invest their gold (even at a crazy low conversion rate) to early buy city plots, islands etc.
It is a great market to explore as also Silver>Gold conversion is there. And this is used not only to buy services/premium, but also to transfer cash to your alts.