How to get rich in Pirates of the Burning Sea

I ended the PotBS closed beta with a freetrader who was only level 19, but had 750,000 doubloons, which is quite a lot of money. I got there by concentrating on the economy part of the game, trade and production. Not only is that part very interesting, it will also be very important for people to sustain PvP. PvP is a negative sum game, in which the losing player often loses more value than the winning one gains. So how does one get rich in the PotBS economy?

First we need to look at the fundamental differences between PotBS and a game like World of Warcraft. In WoW a unit of copper ore obviously has some sales value, but doesn't have any production cost. The only "cost" is the time spent by the WoW player to find a resource node and mine it. As the time of a player has no fixed value (it tends to go up with level and server age), the price for copper ore varies wildly from server to server. This is not the case in Pirates of the Burning Sea. There is copper ore in PotBS, but to produce 10 costs 260 doubloons (including upkeep and taxes) and 1 hour of stored labor. Unless you find somebody who is just plain stupid selling it at a loss for 25 or less, you will usually be able to find copper ore on some auction house for anything between 30 and 50 doubloons.

To make money out of producing items, you need to decided which item is most profitable to produce. You do that by looking at the one thing that limits your production: Stored labor. Every production lot has 24 hours of stored labor per day, and you can only have 10 lots per account, thus 240 hours of stored labor. So lets say you could produce either copper ore or granite. Production cost for copper ore is 26 doubloons per ore, and lets say you could sell it for 40 doubloons, 14 doubloons of profit. As it takes 1/10th of an hour to produce 1 ore, that would mean you receive 140 doubloons per hour of stored labor. Now compare this to granite. It costs only 35 doubloons to make 5 granite, but 2 hours of labor. Production cost is thus only 7 doubloons per unit of granite. Now imagine you could sell the granite for the same 40 doubloons per unit as you can sell the copper ore. Looks attractive, as you paid much less to produce it. But if you look at the labor cost, you just sold 2/5th of an hour of stored labor for 33 doubloons; you'd get only 83 doubloons per hour, considerably less than our copper ore example. In this example, if you had 10 lots making only copper ore and could sell it all for 40, you'd make a profit of 33,600 per day. If you had 10 lots making only granite and sold it for 40, your daily profit would be just under 20,000.

The same thing is true for production chains. You need to calculate how much money you are making per hour (or per day), and not be seduced by big ticket items, or some "percent markup" numbers that mean absolutely nothing. And you should check where exactly in the chain the profit is made. If the profit is more or less evenly distributed over all steps, you might thing of building up the whole chain. But if for example the raw materials are cheap and not very profitable per hour to produce, you might want to buy them from other players and concentrate on the more profitable intermediate and finished goods. That calculation can get rather complicated. A guy named Monthar published a nice Excel spreadsheet on the closed beta boards, but it hasn't been updated for the current build nor copied to the open beta boards afaik. But I'm sure that this or a similar spreadsheet will appear soon.

If you don't want to start fiddling around with spreadsheets, because you don't want to play a freetrader, but concentrate on the combat aspects of PotBS, you should still produce some raw materials. Even if you just get say 20 doubloons per hour of stored labor by making some raw material and selling it in the port where you produced it, that is still nearly 5k free doubloons every day. You'd be stupid not to take those.

Which brings me to the second part of the economy: trading. While producing is for every class, in trading the freetrader class has significant advantages. Given the right skills they can see all auction houses in the world, sail the open sea faster, and trade with foreign nations. For trading the same rule applies as for production: don't look at percentages. Look at the really limiting factor, which is time and cargo capacity. Making 400% profit by buying something for 1 doubloon and selling it for 5 is only good if you can do it without moving, or you have a huge ship and the two ports are very close. Otherwise the 10% profit from buying something for 100 doubloons and selling it for 110 is simply better, because it makes more actual doubloons for the trip.

The big difference between production and trading is that the former makes doubloons per real-time day, the latter makes a profit per hour shipping goods from A to B. A good combination of the two is to produce goods in your chosen home port and ship them to somewhere not too far where the prices are higher. Especially raw material prices are usually lower in ports that have that resource, and can already be higher right next door. The disadvantage of shipping goods around, apart from a potential risk if entering a PvP zone with those goods, is that you don't earn any experience points by that. Thus the low level of my rich freetrader. But then of course you can afford the very best ships, outfitting, and consumables and level up faster afterwards.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:06 AM Permanent Link