When this game become profitable for an average player

May be most of the new players in Entropia Universe are asking this question and some similar like the new player Lancaster did:

"Ok, I'm only about a week in. Love the maps, love the ideas behind a lot of the things in the game, but I'm curious.
What's the endgame like? At what point does it become profitable? I've been told anywhere from months, to years, and even then some.

First off, I understand the whole point of the game isn't for us to have fun, its for MindArk to make money. They provide a service, I pay for that service, I get that...but surely there must come a time when I can gain more than I've lost to skill, right?

How long must I hunt till I can face profitable Creatures? What constitutes profitable?
How long must I mine before Its a worthwhile Profession, and not a PED Sinkhole?
How long must I turn out junk while practicing my crafting ability before I can actually make things worth buying, things that'll make me money in return?

And after all that time, I ask you, is it worth it? Why?"
And here are some of the better replies he got:

Kikki KJ Jikki:
"There's no endgame. If you aren't enjoying playing then change the way you play or play something different because it won't magically become funner when you are higher level.

You can play for little or no cost at any level but you need to understand the economy to do so. In hunting this involves knowing which mobs you can hunt efficiently and which if them have good markup loot at any particular time.

In crafting there are low level components that sell for good MU and others that are TT food. But in general I would say that crafting is best to avoid until you have a large budget."

RP Rave Prospector:
"If you're playing for profit, your in the wrong game.
Unless you want to be a trader and stay out of the loot pool, you cannot guarantee yourself profit. This game is all about paying to play. You just get a chance for return on investment.

A very, very small percentage of players in this game profit on a regular basis. You can, however, mitigate costs by doing your research (especially with entropedia and experienced players) and figuring out what the best recipes for success are. You may also want to look into the various loot theories for each profession. But it comes down to being economical and playing at the proper level for yourself. That's where you'll at least lose the least amount of PEDs.

Sure, you can get lucky and hit a big loot, but don't expect it.

I've been playing since 2002, and I'm far behind breaking even. But I just play to play. Entertainment costs money."

Samuel Sam Robet:
"Profiting takes a ton of darwinism. You constantly need to adjust your game play. You saw many drone hunters die off when the gazz was nerfed, but the good players adjusted their game play and farmed miner bots. The ones unable to adjust just whined in the forums, and didn't survive.
Like davinci said ... you have to find what works, and be willing to walk away from it. I recently farmed spiders when new VU came out. My train of thought was that the new guns would be worth a pretty penny until they were proliferated into the system. So I wanted to become the one proliferating them into the auctioneer.

I spent 32k ped in 3 weeks, and got back 34k peds after markup. I made 2k ped from the markup on the guns, armor, and oils.

When I started the Fury pistol was 150-155% mu, now its 140%. I sold shadow shins at 550%, and now its much less.
As soon as I saw a decline in markup for my goods, i hung up my zero-four and focused on a new endevour.
Adapting and overcoming is a huge part of this game. Just took me loosing 2k usd to figure it out.

Of course it is not all about profiting, and if I had the funds to do it, I would love to hunt for fun. But many of us have to do other things to stay above water so we survive."

Eri Ojyou Sawachika:
"In my opinion, first of all, ditch the whole making profit mindset. This game doesn't allow you to profit (aka making money) off the game system regardless of what level you are and how skilled you are.

Basically, treat this game like all other games you've played.....in terms of gameplay wise.....but watch your ped flow (wallet) like a hawk....in terms of economy wise. In other words, this is just a game that you play with an option to withdraw all your progress and items at the end of it, when you get bored.....well at least whatever's left of it.

Once, you've gotten the right mindset, then we can talk.

To approach this game properly, imho, is to have a proper plan. And with this plan, you WILL stick to it regardless of the outcome. If you don't, you sink.

And what's a proper plan you say? That will change from people to people. But for me, been playing from '08 until now, this is how I do things...

1) Have/Find a way to put peds into your ped card...some people sweat, some trade, some deposit, some walk for stones, some provide services...
2) Control your ped expenses properly. (i.e. if you set your hunting expenses to 100 peds for the day, do not overspend.
3) Regardless of the outcome, never give yourself an excuse to "over-ride" the plan.
4) Once you've spent the allocated allowance, return back to your "ped increasing activity" to cover back the loss you've had.

Well...something like that I guess. In short, find a way to cover your ped loss before you continue with a ped spending activity and you will do fine."

Penny Farthing Ultimate:
"I've only been playing a month and bit, after a "return". So I'm not as knowledgeable as others.But I have noticed this, I started hunting and I was so focused on getting to the next big gun, that I didn't really think about whether I'm being effective with it or not.
So I skilled myself out of 2k PED in a little under 3 weeks.
Sure I had fun, but had I been paying attention that 2k would have kept me going for a hell of a lot longer.

I wasted PED on crafting, I say wasted cause I played around with Quantity and Condition
This was right from the get go.
Now I haven't exactly profited, well not serious wow I can see I did in the sense of big loot.
But I have noticed, as far as hunting goes, sticking to something(which I'm testing think I found something interesting) "around your level" as MA puts it(to me that has a couple of implications, one of which is what you can afford) gives you a better rate of return. Not necessarily ROI, but return as in you can keep doing it for longer.

I guess it's possible to make money, and we all want that. A lot if not most of the players here, I think at least, keep shooting or bombing or clicking in the hope they get the 6/7/8 digit ATH/HoFs.
There's no denying that.

But play to have fun, I won't be having fun running up against Araneatrox now as I'd be one hitted. Even if I sold my car and Chipped in and bought gear to do it. Question is would that be as much fun as say, the Drone's I love killing ?
Probably not cause I'd have to walk everywhere

As for mining, I know I'm quite low level, but I spend erm quite a bunch of PED the one night fiddling with Amped mining. So I bought 3 Level 5 Amps, think it was like 200-300PED of probes and went nuts on an LA.
I lost, not as heavily as I could have, think I lost 250PED total.
And the only reason for that in my opinion was: lack of knowledge/research.
If I'd done a bit of research prior to throwing money at this whim, I bet I could have broken even, maybe even made a couple of PED here and there.
I did gain quite a bit of skills though hehehehe.

The moment you don't need/desire something, it "generally comes your way" is my mind set :P
And it works hehehe.

So it's possible to profit, but don't aim at that. Aim at having fun, works the best. If you happen to get lucky along the way...."

Lady Jennifer Art:
"This game becomes profitable when you have knowledge, no really level.
My story:

I played this game a while ago, came back learnt more, helped new players out in a society. Meanwhile I was dropping level 3-8 amps getting pissed off I could not make a profit. I then got very annoyed and though hey, this is not right, researched spent way to much time doing so.

Began to mine, recording results, trends and a lot more things that I am not going to tell you.

Had a 105 and 100peds when I started. Over the next 2 months I turned that into 3000ped.

This was from level 15-20 In prospecting.

You can not go out hunt with eco guns or eco mining tools and expect to make a profit. These tools only enhance the profit, so in other words they increase your margins. You first need to learn about this game and spend way to much time doing so :P

If you have time, patience and ability to learn then you can make a profit here.

It is not fun though I warn you, ok hold it, it might be fun when you have it nailed, but while learning to do it getting everything sorted it is not very fun :S

I spent 5 hours a day doing crap, then about an hour or 2 actually mining/playing.

I will tell you this, Markup is key :P

Do not give other players any form of discount. If you sell to a trader giving you 5% less than the market, after 10,000ped cycled, that's like 500ped down the drain. You may be like what 10k peds that's loads, I thought that, but you can easily cycle that and not notice.

Edit: also that 5% off your markeup could be the difference between a profit or a loss. These traders are here to make a profit so....

Markup! use it, exploit it "

Rickard Rick England:
"I’ve been hunting in game for a good 7+ years. Because it is a real cash economy here, I’ve always viewed skills gained as “locked in” value, therefore if you decide to leave in the future you can sell all your skills, and leave the game with that value. This may or may not cover all your deposits.

At high levels (after a few years) it’s easy to burn $100 in a day or two and have not much to show for it apart from those skills earned. Other times $100 will last a lot longer.

Truth is you can do one thing one day and make a really nice profit, and on another day doing the SAME THING you will lose you everything you’ve got (if you don’t log off). You can of course get by in game with almost nil investment, but for me that is not entertainment, it is a boring in game existence. So you get to a point that you are happy to pay for you entertainment each month and hope that will satisfy the MA treasurer. Sadly what you might consider is adequate to play the game will never ever be enough.

One thing is for sure with EU, it will take you on a rollercoaster of emotions you can only dream of, massive highs, and long patches of depressing lows. How you can handle those emotions and play cat and mouse with your ped card against the house, will determine how long you will survive in game.

I love EU to bits, it is a big part of my life, although at times it is a LOVE-HATE relationship at the extremes.

If you are lucky and stick out as a newbie with potential, you might be shown some MA love for a year maybe even more.

So in conclusion pay to play and enjoy yourself, if you manage to have some peds to take out at the end of your avatars life, then that’s better than a game with no real cash economy."

Forgo Forgorth Lundain:
"There is no point of profit for the average player.
Here, like anywhere is the same. It takes money, time or both to make money.

If you are wise and know when and where to invest, then you have a better chance. Here it can be anything, skills, loot, gear, it all fluctuates and has potential for profit.

For the players that do profit regularly without playing the market, they likely paid much more for their gear, and time spent to use this gear effectively.
Mod faps, IMK2, some armor sets are costly for a reason. They offer a noticeable return on investment, and usually retain the initial investment when sold. Same goes for LA's, MS's or other large purchases.

You need the bankroll to have the opportunity to see a profitable return in somewhat short order.

The mechanic is similar to an investment in CLD's, you need the money to invest to see a return. And the return is nearly always over a set period of time, in months/years before a profit point is reached anyhow, in some unwise investments is longer, and some, far far less.
(some bought at less than 1000, some at 1300+)..... more than a year difference to point of profit.

If you spend 1 ped a day, you are spending more time than money towards profit.
If you spend 1000 ped a day, your progress is accelerated by spending more money than time towards profit.

Even those that try and manage the market wisely, the profitable ones are far from average, sporting big bankrolls. Purchasing power usually gets a better return by volume. Just look at the lowest MU of stackables on auction, generally, the larger the stack, the lower the MU.

Seeing as most of the above mentioned items are far out of reach from the average player, you can see how it may be possible, but not without sacrifice.

This separation between the average player and the profitable player is highly dependent on how much time, money or both, they put into the game. Even still, these alone are not enough, you need the knowledge and research to apply them most effectively.

Skills will see a lower noticeable (negative in appearance) return until completely sold. And will never be the basis of profit alone until then.

Investment in gear, BP's, Weapons, Faps, LA's that offer a stable return is where this profit can be taken advantage of.

Ultimately, all profits come from the playerbase, the average player is paying the ones who invested to make profit, MU is dictated by players, and until you find something that gets a markup from players regularly, you wont make profit.

This isn't to say though that all things need a huge bankroll, there are many things that are affordable, and offer a good chance of profit under everyone's nose, The average players generally don't see them or even care to look that deep. There will always be reckless spenders with more money than concern, and frugal penny pinchers. More and more people pay for convenience, it is a growing profitable model worldwide, in EU and out."

Mordrell Baas WHAT:
"This game is paid for by the ATH hunting fools who mine FOMA/Hell with amps, craft amps on condition and camp Levi/Scoria waiting for their ATH.
If this is you then then there is a super small chance you will profit... better off buying lotto tickets.

You will get on average 95% back on all tt you spend so to break even you need to cover at least 5% from mu.... mining this is easiest. If you go after ore/enmat with 105% ave mu you should be breaking even, 110% ave mu you should be making 5% on what you spend on tt. Adding amps allows you to cycle more faster but you will need to go after higher mu ore/enmat to cover the mu lost to the amps. Or just cycle more 5% of 1 million is more then 10% of a 100k afterall.

This same principle can be applied to hunting but here it is more difficult as a large part of the loot has little or no mu, so the loot that does supply mu has to supply enough to cover the lack of it in the other loot. Gear and skills allow you to hunt the bigger and more exotic mobs that have better mu loot.... to get there though you need to either chip in or grind your way past the small mobs.

Before I get complainers... my own logs puts me on 97.63% tt return (armor decay included)... and very far in the green after mu. 95% is low balling the return rate in my opinion

As others stated tho you need to constantly adapt your strategy because as soon as some mu is discovered ppl will settle on it like flies on shit. Also it constantly astounds me to see people keeping grinding at one mission even tho they are getting poor results.... if a mob or mining area isn't working for you today switch mobs or log out for a while. Every hunt/mining run wont be a tt profit and sometimes you will come back with 70% tt return, this will be balanced out by the good runs tho ... tracking your results is a good way to keep your spirits up instead of staring at a dwindling pedcard."