I started with a Paladin and when I got to Act 2, the game was impossible! I could barely kill any monsters and had spec'd into the wrong skills and stats.
Next I started over with a Necromancer which was much easier and I got up to mid 80s levels fairly quickly. At some point I was accumulating items too fast and for different classes. I looked on Ebay and items were selling for quite a lot.
The most expensive item was the Buriza-Do Kyanon which was selling for $1,200 and had multiple bids. It was advertised as being crazy fast for killing monsters. From what I researched, it could one shot almost any enemy.
I then began to sell excessive items that I wasn't using on Ebay. After farming each day I would post the items and guess a price based off other auctions. The items began to get bids and I started making some money!
I would arrange times to transfer in game after the auctions were ending. Since I was online playing most of the time anyways, it was easy to make the transfers and still grind to get loot.
At some point I decided I needed to upgrade my own gear and what better place then to reinvest then to buy from Ebay myself. I bid on a Stone of Jordan and won that auction. The guy transferred in game, and he told me: hey, if you need any more of these SOJs I can get them for you.
I told him I would be interested in buying as many as SOJs as he had, and he said he could sell me up to 50! I was incredulous how he had 50 SOJs, but I negotiated a price of $3 per SOJ and started buying them this way. This guy became my SOJ dealer.
Only later I realized he either figured out how to dupe them, or knew someone who was.
I started buying the SOJs in mass, usually in quantities of 25 or 50. Then I'd create a game like "SOJ for trade" or such and see what people would offer. A lot of times they'd offer something that was going for $10 or $20 on Ebay. If I traded a SOJ for a $20 item, it was an immediate $17 profit for me. Eventually it became more profitable to make trades like this rather then playing.
However, I still wanted to play to get loot and my necro was horribly inefficient. I created an Amazon because it was the fastest for farming. Reinvesting my money I spent $200 on the Buriza as prices had come down on it a lot as more people found them. Once I got my Buriza I was unstoppable! I could farm Chaos Sanctuary solo and clear it by one-shot nearly everything.
In the long run it was more profitable just to keep buying the SOJs from my dealer rather then play. But I enjoyed playing as well.
I played and traded for maybe 6 months and in that time I profited about $10,000. Maybe a year later the economy for D2 had already crashed and items were not worth that much. The following year I wrote about this experience for college applications as evidence of "entrepreneurship" lol
Funny enough I never played the expansion and when I started with D2R I didn't realize there were "runewords". I thought they were just another form of gems u socket, and didn't understand the big deal.
Also the second week of the game I found a Stone of Jordan farming cows! I saw in the lobby someone had "Buriza 4 trade" or similar title. Went into the game and said I could offer an SOJ. The guy snap clicked accept the trade.
I only found out a little bit later I was the one getting ripped off
Someone then explained to me that SOJ was incredibly rare, and only in the original D2 was Buriza worth anything. He said "Faith" was a better bow, and then I looked that up and started seeing what runes were all about.
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