A large portion of your money should come from selling your crafting materials on the market. Most pieces can net you more money than you'd imagine. Unfortunately, with no auction house, that does mean a little while spent trolling general chat, but at the end of it you'll be several thousand crowns wealthier. Just be sure to reserve what you need for your own crafting purposes, or understand prices well enough to know that you'll be able to buy back what you need without too much loss when it comes time.

On that subject, at least until an auction house is implemented, there really SHOULD be a dedicated trade channel.

Full Tier1 run costs 60 energy, assuming you don't die/open optional energy gates. I only make, on average, between 1-2k doing a full Tier1 run.

Tier2 runs are much more lucrative, imo, as you spend about 80 energy (again, assuming you don't die, and don't open optional gates), and can generate between 6-8k.

But really, yeh, what djbiznatch was saying, if you're looking at the NPC vendors, they are overpriced. If you buy the recipes, and craft the items, you can typically get them for thousands of crowns cheaper.

Also, there is a forum dedicated to the Bazaar. So you wouldn't necessarily have to troll general chat, you could always post in the forum; though it would be quicker to troll.

Yeah the playing for hours and only making 3k seems likes hours in T1.

Personally I suggest buying cobalt recipes and getting all 2* gear so you can very quickly get into T2 and start making real money. Then you can spend as much time as you like earning crowns and searching for recipes for the gear you really want. Just my 2 cents.

I would measure the money gain you get by energy and not by hours spent playing because then it's easier to convert that into units that you can manipulate. For example, with 100 energy, me and my friend are able to gain about 4000-4500 crowns from a couple runs through T1 (we just unlocked T2 so that number will increase). The current cost of CE is about 3000 crowns per 100 (number might be off a bit but basic idea is that its < 4000). This means that it's possible for me and my friend to run through our entire stock of 100 ME in a day, go and buy some CE, and repeat the process infinitely making about 1000 crowns of profit per run.

When profit accumulates enough you can then use it to buy some recipes and items and start unlocking the next tier. However, at T2, the energy and money it takes to advance to T3 is fairly high. Forging 4 star equips takes 200 extra energy (~6000 extra crowns) plus increased recipe and material costs. Assuming you've now made it to T2 and you're netting 6k-8k per 100 energy you'll run at least a 3000 crown surplus when using an entire 100 energy reserve. This means that it would take 1 round to gain the money necessary to do one 4 star forging, 5 100 energy rounds to buy the 4 star recipe, and maybe another 3+ rounds to gather materials or get enough crowns to buy materials if you're unlucky. In all, to reach T3 without taking any breaks and assuming the conditions I mentioned above you would take approximately 60 full 100 energy rounds (20 for the T1 and 40 for T2). This does not include deaths and other energy consuming tasks you might encounter. These calculations also do not include the energy gain from ME. You could decrease the number of rounds it takes you to complete a tier by simply waiting 24 hours for your ME to refill to 100 and using that 100 to make pure crowns profit toward buying recipes and materials. I'm too lazy to calculate the best mix of buying CE and waiting for ME to refill that will minimize the time it takes for you to get to T3, but if someone else's up to it that'd be pretty cool.

Given the ability to complete a full set of 4 star equipment in less than 100 straight rounds I would say that the crown drop rate is pretty good.

If you're missing stuff, especially for 2 star equips, you can probably find it in the token trader's stash, or you can head over to a populated channel and start spamming "B> " or "WTB> " or whatever you wanna say to indicate that you're buying (I honestly don't understand why people put the useless "WT" in front of their requests "WTS", "WTB" they both have WT in front so why not truncate it and just use "B" and "S"? it'd be easier to read imo >.>). *Most* 2 star forging materials that you can't find easily yourself will be something like 300 to 800 crowns each.

It -is- very difficult to be a T1 player, especially a T1 rookie who may not be able to do 3 stages of arena and live or might even die in graveyards or at least not run over every grave in the haste to escape... -if- you are trying to play intensively and for free.

Every day you get 100 mist energy. 10 levels of play. Even if you're not doing hard levels, that should easily make 5000 crowns - assuming you're killing every monster, exploring every path before going through the one way party gate, and busting open every bush. Every level costs to enter, and if you don't scour the level completely, you may not make as much as your entry fee is worth.

Of course, if you -do- spend real money you don't have to care about that, you can play your levels for your cash-bought CE and rack up the crowns simply enough. I still would care, because I can't stop thinking of CE as having a crown -value- however it's actually acquired. (I'm a freeplayer thus far, and I should be able to enter tier 3 tonight after about 2 weeks of play. Much slower than cash players, yes, but... it can probably be done within a week if you have more time to devote to the game and/or you sell more of your collected materials and/or you don't try 5 lines of 2* swords before getting on with some serious upgrading ;) )

T2 pays -substantially- better than T1, but you should still hunt down every monster, treasure box, and bush. Death to shrubberies!

do the big plants not drop as many coins as the small ones? it seems that way to me in the wolver dens (not sure they appear anywhere else), so i tend to not wack at those

I've whacked a lot of big plants and never seen them drop a heart. I have seen them -hide- hearts though that had been dropped by a monster, and also hide small plants that have hearts in them. Still, if there's a chance of hearts in them, that'd be a nice bonus, but I smash them for crowns. Ideally with a high rate of fire gun so it doesn't take long.