Ahh, the sweet smell of money with the morning coffee. Well, let's set that aside for now. Assuming that one has already mastered the basic concepts of how to run/rent a booth, this guide is designed to show strategies on how to both maximize profit and minimize losses in a market run by laissez faire. Though, before we begin, what is laissez faire?

A quick browse of any internet search engine will most likely lead one to the general definition of "a market without government influence". For us, this means that the game market is driven by prices players set, and possible external factors such as events. However, for the purpose of this guide, external factors such as events shall be left aside, and one will deal with strategies devised based on the booth itself.

When it comes to boothing, there are three important factors to consider: time, place, and price. Time refers to the amount of time one will be willing to booth. Generally, the longer one booths, the more likely one is to sell their product. Place refers to the location of the booth. Is it well seen, or in the middle of nowhere? Lastly, price is the amount of price that one sets their item to, in contrast to average, or market price. Is it higher, lower, or the same as market price?

TIME

As stated before, time is the amount one would be willing to booth: one hour, two hours, or the whole night? Since the longer people booth the more chance there is to sell a product, people generally leave their booths on overnight. However, one thing to point out would is that there is a cost per hour when renting a booth, so even though one may be renting to sell for profit, one may end up with a negative profit instead. A good calculation of profit to cost would be the general ratio of ZP + Gold minus the amount of hours you're boothing multiplied by the gold it costs to rent a booth for one hour (Remember to use your order of operations, kiddos). To calculate the value of ZP to gold, there are three ways: comparing ZP to a double-standard item (something that can be sold in both ZP and gold), comparing ZP to vendor-standard meteors), or comparing ZP to gold directly.

Comparing ZP to a double-standard item is the easiest of the three choices, since there is generally a stable market price for such items. It is also arguably the most efficient of the three choices, since it involves less market observation (saves time), has a better exchange rate (higher return rate than vendor-standard meteors), and is generally considered to be at a "market price". The general comparison item for such a method is the player sold meteor, since there is always a demand for the item. Using Centaurus server as a basis for pricing, the meteor generally sells for 4-6 ZPs, at a gold rate of 1-1.4 million gold. If one takes the averages of both of these ranges, one gets 5 ZP per meteor sold to 1.2 million gold, which factors into 240,000 gold per ZP. While the figures may be flux, the formula used is still applied, and can be used to minimize losses when boothing.

Comparing ZP to vendor-standard meteors works very much in the same way as the above formula, with a slight difference: this time the price is always set, at an inflated rate of 2 million gold per meteor. Assuming once again that the average price per meteor is 5 ZP, the price of 1 ZP would be 400,000 gold. This, however, is a very unreliable system to use when taking in consideration the fact of the aforementioned market prices. Since the market price of 1 ZP is worth approximately 240,000 gold (generally less), assuming that 1 ZP is worth 400,000 gold would be overestimating by 160,000 gold. Such an overestimate would result in 16 hours of loss per ZP on even the most expensive booths (Centaurus server is, once again, used as an example).

The last, and quite possibly the most profit-garnering, system to use would be the direct ZP to gold transaction. This cuts out the need of an intermediate step, and thus results in a much higher profit of gold per ZP. However, the chances of making such a transaction are far and few between, which means that there is no stable market for the exact exchange of ZPs to gold. Therefore, in the interest of time, this is not a reliable source to use when trying to calculate profit (or minimize loss, as it was phrased before).

-- By Enek --