Hello, I started RO back in 2005 on a low rate server, played for 10 years until the server was forced to wipe after a scandal revealing a GM was selling boss cards to players for real money. The wipe took out years of my hard earned items, and just when I was starting to have a fighting chance amongst the community. Then work got busy and I stopped playing, eventually forgetting about RO.
Then, near the end of last year as I was sorting out my hard drive I came across the old client for the old server I played on, and it brought back all the good times of RO in the past. So I thought about getting back into the game, but my knowledge of RO is a bit rusty and a few years outdated, so I needed to get a refresher first and remember the basics. It then came down to the question of what type of server I should choose. Low rate takes forever to make any progress, and high rates are too inflated that takes all the fun out (plus they're not known to be too stable too) so it looks like mid rate was going to strike the best balance
Right now the server I'm in has a collapsing economy. By that I mean due to being a mid rate, zeny is easier to come by and therefore it's not the main currency, that falls to the battleground badges. But due to a large number of players having left the server, this directly impacted battleground frequency and as a result there are a lot less badges in circulation, which in turn devalued a lot of rare items (For example, an Ice Pick in the early days when I joined cost 5k badges, now it's only 1k)
Like any server, typically a few high level players who hunts MVPs exclusively camps it constantly around the clock, making it almost impossible for new players like me to even have a chance at fighting it, let alone beat the extremely low drop chance for a card. But we have a NPC that basically allow you to exchange 5 relatively worthless cards for a randomly generated card, this includes MVP cards (the catch is while the normal cards are randomly generated, the MVP cards are fixed at 0.01%) So with this NPC it means even without being able to fight the MVPs you can still potentially get their card, without any interference from other players. Only problem is it cost 5 million a try.
Now normally I would have just consulted with the RMS database, see which loot sells the most and calculated if it was viable to farm zeny that way. But recently a player I've talk to placed some doubts within me when he said that he could make 10 million in just 5 minutes. Through calculation that would mean he would have to be making 2 million a minute, or roughly 33k a second, and after searching through the database nothing of high value would sell for that much in such a short period of time. Now you might think he could have gotten a rare item from a MVP fight that lasted in just 5 minutes and it sells for 10 million, but given our economy is mostly based on badges, it doesn't make sense for him to be selling it in zeny.
I've looked up a few guides online, and while they do make some good suggestions, most of it can't be applied. See, on my server a number of high value items like Witherless rose, Diamond Rings, Khukri, etc all have their sell prices nerfed, making them unfavorable for farming. While Gold and Treasure Chest, 2 of the highest valued junk items I know remained the same price, their drop rate is so low at 1% and 2.5% that it'll take forever to get any reasonable amount to sell for a decent return (and that's with the bubblegum consumable that increases drop rate by 100%)
Before any of you suggest I farm for cards or items in demand. Let me just point out that anything I can get the high level players likely can too, and they most likely have more than enough and don't need to buy it from me. Bottom line is, with the exception of rare items from MVPs, most common items can be easily gotten by any player with very little effort, in other words there's no market for it
Right now my main source of zeny comes from Desert Wolf and it's daggers, which sells for 12k after overcharge, the occasional katar that sells for 26k, and the 2 types of wolf claws that gets me 5 million after I save up 30k of them each. With roughly 570 free space in storage I can make around 7 million a trip, however there's a noticeable lag when transferring items from storage to inventory and pushcart, and later on the sell screen. This causes the selling process to take nearly 10 minutes, add in the roughly 30 minutes it takes to fill up that storage to full and finish a trip, you can see the whole process is not going at a fast pace
Long story short, I've played on this server for a couple months now, and I've reached to a point where I'm stuck and can't make anymore meaningful progress without some key MVP/miniboss card's help, and the NPC that can give me those cards with a slim chance cost a lot of money and at the rate I'm farming it's going to take way too long. Meanwhile my fingers are hurting from all the right clicking I had to do in order to transfer items from storage for sale, and I'm pretty sure my mouse is on the verge of being worn out. So I'd really appreciate if someone can point me to an alternative that could speed things up a bit and make things a bit easier on my fingers. Thank you for your time. Cheers.
P.S. the drop rate is x50