Matzkops [2566807] —
Original article
Read Matzkops' guide to trading weapons in Torn City, including tips on how to get started, identifying price points, and how to manipulate the market for maximum profit.
The Weapons trade is one of the most important markets in Torn City - without it, we'd all be resorted to punching and kicking each other to death in the streets. And because some fights can be decided by the slimmest of margins, the demand for the finest quality weaponry is and has always been high.
This was true even before the introduction of Advanced Weapons and Armors, and it remains true today. There is still a huge market out there for standard weapons, and in this article, I'm going to share with you my knowledge on how to grab a slice of this action, including tips on how to source the right stock, how to price correctly, and what you need to do to dominate the market.
My Story
I first started trading weapons in October 2020 after I sold an 85% full body armor for $27m. This was a lot of money for me at the time, and it gave me a cash platform to invest in the weapons trade. This seed money was increased many times over when I later won a PI from the Wheel of Awesome. I sold this PI for $365m to Realistassasin (who I thank for not scamming me), and son I had nearly $400m with which to build a business.
Now I know what you're thinking. This sounds like one of those articles about how some kid bought their first house at 21 with nothing but hard work, talent, and a small loan of $1 million from their parents. Admittedly, my good fortune gave me the basis to begin my career in the weapons trade, but at the time of writing, I am estimated to have earned over $20b from weapons trading, with over $10b still sitting in my inventory or on the item market. Seed money is only useful if you know how to invest it properly.
But before I spent a single penny, I made sure that I knew precisely what I was spending it on.
Know The Market
The first thing you have to do if you want to be a successful weapon trader is to pick a weapon and learn about it. For now, you should probably start with one or at most a handful of weapons, as otherwise, you'll overstretch yourself. Once you've chosen a weapon to invest in, find out who is buying it, why they're buying it, where it comes from, and whether there is an abundance or dearth of this weapon at present.
A quick look at the valuation graph will give youa hint absolutely no viable information regarding the weapons market. These graphs might be useful for regular items, but when it comes to weapons, their market graph doesn't take into account the quality of the items sold, so feel free to ignore these entirely.
To get a more accurate valuation of a weapon you should start by looking at the individual listings, noting down the quality, accuracy, and damage ratings compared to the price. It's really helpful when individual sellers list numerous variants of the same item as this shows you the incremental increase in value you can expect when a weapon's stats go up.
Larger Link
However, when you're recording this data - and you absolutely should do this - it's important to note that the weapons you can see for sale are the ones that haven't sold yet. This means that their pricing may be *slightly* too high, so make sure you have data sets taken from a few different traders in order to gauge the most realistic value for your chosen weapon - you can search through the trade forums to help figure this out too.
When analysing a weapon's value using this method, it's important to stay within 5% over or under in terms of quality to get an accurate listing. For example, if I am holding a Diamond Bladed Knife with 60% quality, looking at the price of 50% or 70% knives will tell me nothing because they belong to an entirely different category. Looking at the prices for DBKs of 59% and 61% quality items will give me the best idea as to how I should price a 60% item.
For DBKs it’s easy to get the price right, though, because there are a lot on the market, with a great variety of quality available. At the time of writing, the cheapest DBK with 60% is at $45m, so if I want to sell mine quickly, I'd better make it a bit cheaper, like $43m. If I can afford to wait a while, I'll match my rival and put it up at $45m.
Growing Your Stock
If you want to dominate the market, you need a good amount of stock. But how does one acquire enough weapons to become a full-blown arms dealer? Buying from the item market is one way, but these weapons are often pretty expensive already, having been marked up for profit by the seller.
All weapons that hold value can be bought abroad, so when you're first starting out, flying and buying them yourself is an option - make sure you're maxing out your travel item allowance using jobs and suitcases. But eventually, you'll want to make use of other people's time and pay people to fly for you. If you make enough of a name for yourself then item runners will eventually start offering their services to you. But to begin with, advertising in the forums and trade chat is the best way to make your needs known.
As the buyer, I pay for the cost of the items bought along with an additional fee per flight. These flight fees can be between $2-3.5 million, depending on the destination, but they are dependent on the item runner being able to hold 29 items while traveling - fewer slots mean a lower payment. New players and those chasing flying merits will always be your best item runners, and if you treat them well and pay them on time you'll receive a steady stream of weapons and armors without having to leave the comfort of Torn City.
Making Money
So you're lumbered with an excess of weapons stock. Great! Now how do you make money off it? First, you should bear in mind that this will take you some time. It took me three months to turn a raw profit from my initial foray into the weapons trade, so make sure you're not relying on this cash and you have an emergency fund there to pay for your other Torn activities.
There are a few ways you can go about selling your wares, including selling through your own bazaar, listing your weapons on the item market, or selling directly via trade chat and the forums. Many sellers choose the bazaar option to avoid the 3% item market fee applied to all sales, but when I started out, I chose to eat these costs just to make some sales - I eventually took a job as a property broker to avoid item market fees altogether.
In my eyes, the item market is the best place to sell weapons. Few people are willing to go through hundreds of bazaars to find the best deal, and even when you arrive at a bazaar you like the look of, trawling through the seller's array of poorly ordered stock can be painful. Chedburn's planned improvements may change this one day, but for now, the item market remains the easiest place for customers to find what they need since most people are willing to look at the last two pages of listings of the weapon they want to buy.
Another aspect of selling that both buyers and sellers find difficult to deal with is mugging. This has never really been an issue for me, and I like to tell myself that it’s because people respect me so much. The truth is that high-quality items take a lot of effort and/or time to resell, so it's rare to find players who will buy-mug you when purchasing items like these - they're far more likely to buy-mug when purchasing bulk quantities of easily flippable generic items, like Xanax, or Donator Packs.
But just because these idiots are rare, it doesn't mean you won't meet them.
Scaling Up
Once you feel comfortable buying and selling weapons, you can do it on a bigger scale by dominating a certain weapon's market. If you feel like a weapon's price overall is too cheap, you can actively manipulate the market by buying up the competition in a certain quality category. This can be very lucrative if done right, as you may have seen a few months ago when motorcycle helmets rose from $8m to over $50m within the space of a year.
I have done this myself with a wide range of items, including Armas, Macanas, Kodachis, BT-MPs, and even DBKs to a certain extent. But if you don't want to risk your fortune and buy up the whole market, you can still employ price manipulation tactics by buying up a small selection instead.
Let’s say I've got a pair of 60% Metal Nunchakus which I'm yet to value. On the market, there is my own pair of 57% quality at $31m, Choco180’s 61.5% pair for $34m, and Wendy’s 62.5% for $49m. Based on this array of prices, I should try to sell my 60% pair for between $31m and $34m. And in truth, I should really lower the price of the 57% pair, because at only a $3m price difference, there is no way these can compete against the 61.5% one.
But there's a trick to use here that ensures I can make a little more money on both pairs of nunchaku. If I buy the 61.5% pair from Choco180, I can leave my 57% pair at $31m, and try to resell Choco180's pair for around $46m. If we base the pricing on mine and Wendy's items, you're looking at roughly $300k per 0.1 percentage point. This either means Choco180's valuation of $34m is way under, or my whole valuation system is wrong because Wendy's price of $49m is too high. If you're in business to make money, you may as well aim for the stars and go high.
I made Choco180 an offer of $25m directly via chat, and he accepted. Even if I sell these nunchakus for his original asking price of $34m I'd make $9m profit. And if Choco180 had wanted me to pay market price I'd still make a profit, because when I resell these nunchakus I'm going to peg their value to Wendy's prices and put them up for $46m. This means I can also keep my 57% quality pair up for sale at $31m, giving myself the potential to make profit on both items.
Then, if I take the 60% pair I mentioned earlier, these can go on at $40m based on my earlier calculations as to what would be a fair price based on Wendy's high-valued 62.5% nunchakus. Sure, Wendy's price may be a little high, but now that my prices for several items are proportional to hers, they all look a little more reasonable. And seeing as I have three nunchakus up for sale compared to Wendy's one, it is now my valuations that are determining the market, not hers.
This method doesn't always work, however, particularly if you're dealing with an item as unpopular as the Metal Nunchakus. If you are struggling to sell an item due to its low popularity, then try to find the cheapest weapon available with similar quality, and sell it just below that value. Sometimes, in business, you have to take a small loss to avoid a bigger one!
Advanced Weapons
In December 2021, advanced weapons and armors were released alongside the new ranked warring feature. I quickly realized that the market had changed overnight, with weapon types that I had never traded before suddenly becoming popular, and high-quality versions of once-popular weapons losing a great deal of value.
With more and more factions gaining caches, more and more players tried their luck in trading ranked weapons. And while some advanced arms dealers had great success, many vastly over or underestimated the value of these new items, resulting in several billions worth of losses - it really does pay to do your research!
Finding out the value of an advanced weapon or armor piece is more complicated than evaluating a standard item since there are far fewer available for comparison. Fellow weapons enthusiast masheen has a fantastic tool to help you work out the value of advanced items, and he will be talking about his methods of advanced weapon and armor analysis in a forthcoming newspaper article.
In the meantime, my rule of thumb is that if the base stats of an Advanced weapon are better than the best kind of regular weapon in the same category, the weapon will usually be valued similarly to the cache it came from. However, this rule may have to be adjusted soon, since prices are falling, but in the short term, I think you can expect to pay at least 50% of a weapon's cache's price. Here is my own personal list of the best standard weapons to use for comparison when attempting to value a piece of Advanced weaponry.
For example, let's say you come across a Taurus with the Assassinate perk. While this weapon looks all fancy at first glance, a brief look at its compared to a standard Qsz-92 shows this weapon can't compete with a 64 dmg 55 acc Qsz-92 that you can buy on the item market for less than $2m. I lovingly call those weapons "crap weps", and buy them for $80m in the hopes to swap them for caches at some point, once that feature gets added.
I don't want to say too much here to avoid covering what masheen is going to investigate in his forthcoming article on advanced weapons and armors, but basically, if the stats of the weapon can compete with non-warring weapons, look at the bonus. Most people want two things from their weapons: damage and consistency. If a bonus does one or both of these, you've got yourself a fine weapon indeed.
But that doesn't mean you should sell it.
Weapon Rental
When advanced weapons dropped there was one perk that immediately caught my eye: Warlord. This bonus gives the user 15% or more increased respect with the final hit, and I loved the idea of owning multiple warlord weapons and renting them out for people to use in ranked wars.
For those of you who've been here a while, you might remember the times when PnB dominated Torn wars by owning the majority of firework stands, as these could be used to remove respect from other factions. Renting warlords is the closest I am able to get to that old glory, and so, together with PnB's bald champ MadMikeTyson, we were able to acquire 14 weapons with the warlord bonus. While we're happy with our armory at the moment, I don't think we'd be able to refuse a good deal on an 15th.
Warlord weapons are highly underrated in my eyes. I wrote the last sentence some weeks ago, at a time when warlords were affordable. It seems that most big factions have now realized that they are quite useful and prices have skyrocketed. Getting a huge respect increase after an attack means that fewer attacks overall are required to win the war, saving you precious energy. It also gives your opponent less time to mount a counterattack, and most importantly, it helps to break enemy morale. As every leader knows, once your troops don't want to fight anymore, you are done.
Even one weapon being rotated between members is able to influence a war significantly. Now imagine having 10 of those, or being on the receiving end of 10 warlord weapons. To rent out a warlord weapon, I insist on being sent a certain amount of collateral depending on how many weapons my customer plans on renting. This collateral consists of items and cash, and these are always returned (minus the rental fee) via a trade once the user has achieved their objectives.
Conclusion
Over time, as my business grew, I had a lot of people ask me how to trade weapons, hence why I wrote this article. I enjoy helping other traders, even if some of them would grow to be my competitors, but the friendships I made were definitely worth it. If you're one of those people who write to Aunty Torn asking her how to make money in Torn City, I hope my story has helped to answer that question.
As you'll see if you follow in my footsteps, the weapons market is far from dead, despite the introduction of advanced weapons and armors. Even now I'm seeing an increase in Arma and DBK sales, as while the rich kids fight over the orange and red weapons, the rest of Torn benefits by being able to purchase high-quality regular weapons cheaper than ever before.
Trading weapons will always be lucrative for those willing to put the work in. I am proud of the emporium I was able to build up, all of which was only possible due to weapons trading. From $400m to tens of billions worth of weapons in about 1.5 years. If that's not theAmerican Torn City dream I don't know what is.
PS: If trading collateral every time you rent a warlord is too much of a hassle, take a look into my stocks fund. That way I can earn some money for both of us while you make bank slaughtering your opponents!
This was true even before the introduction of Advanced Weapons and Armors, and it remains true today. There is still a huge market out there for standard weapons, and in this article, I'm going to share with you my knowledge on how to grab a slice of this action, including tips on how to source the right stock, how to price correctly, and what you need to do to dominate the market.
My Story
I first started trading weapons in October 2020 after I sold an 85% full body armor for $27m. This was a lot of money for me at the time, and it gave me a cash platform to invest in the weapons trade. This seed money was increased many times over when I later won a PI from the Wheel of Awesome. I sold this PI for $365m to Realistassasin (who I thank for not scamming me), and son I had nearly $400m with which to build a business.
Now I know what you're thinking. This sounds like one of those articles about how some kid bought their first house at 21 with nothing but hard work, talent, and a small loan of $1 million from their parents. Admittedly, my good fortune gave me the basis to begin my career in the weapons trade, but at the time of writing, I am estimated to have earned over $20b from weapons trading, with over $10b still sitting in my inventory or on the item market. Seed money is only useful if you know how to invest it properly.
But before I spent a single penny, I made sure that I knew precisely what I was spending it on.
Know The Market
The first thing you have to do if you want to be a successful weapon trader is to pick a weapon and learn about it. For now, you should probably start with one or at most a handful of weapons, as otherwise, you'll overstretch yourself. Once you've chosen a weapon to invest in, find out who is buying it, why they're buying it, where it comes from, and whether there is an abundance or dearth of this weapon at present.
A quick look at the valuation graph will give you
To get a more accurate valuation of a weapon you should start by looking at the individual listings, noting down the quality, accuracy, and damage ratings compared to the price. It's really helpful when individual sellers list numerous variants of the same item as this shows you the incremental increase in value you can expect when a weapon's stats go up.
Larger Link
However, when you're recording this data - and you absolutely should do this - it's important to note that the weapons you can see for sale are the ones that haven't sold yet. This means that their pricing may be *slightly* too high, so make sure you have data sets taken from a few different traders in order to gauge the most realistic value for your chosen weapon - you can search through the trade forums to help figure this out too.
When analysing a weapon's value using this method, it's important to stay within 5% over or under in terms of quality to get an accurate listing. For example, if I am holding a Diamond Bladed Knife with 60% quality, looking at the price of 50% or 70% knives will tell me nothing because they belong to an entirely different category. Looking at the prices for DBKs of 59% and 61% quality items will give me the best idea as to how I should price a 60% item.
For DBKs it’s easy to get the price right, though, because there are a lot on the market, with a great variety of quality available. At the time of writing, the cheapest DBK with 60% is at $45m, so if I want to sell mine quickly, I'd better make it a bit cheaper, like $43m. If I can afford to wait a while, I'll match my rival and put it up at $45m.
Growing Your Stock
If you want to dominate the market, you need a good amount of stock. But how does one acquire enough weapons to become a full-blown arms dealer? Buying from the item market is one way, but these weapons are often pretty expensive already, having been marked up for profit by the seller.
All weapons that hold value can be bought abroad, so when you're first starting out, flying and buying them yourself is an option - make sure you're maxing out your travel item allowance using jobs and suitcases. But eventually, you'll want to make use of other people's time and pay people to fly for you. If you make enough of a name for yourself then item runners will eventually start offering their services to you. But to begin with, advertising in the forums and trade chat is the best way to make your needs known.
As the buyer, I pay for the cost of the items bought along with an additional fee per flight. These flight fees can be between $2-3.5 million, depending on the destination, but they are dependent on the item runner being able to hold 29 items while traveling - fewer slots mean a lower payment. New players and those chasing flying merits will always be your best item runners, and if you treat them well and pay them on time you'll receive a steady stream of weapons and armors without having to leave the comfort of Torn City.
Making Money
So you're lumbered with an excess of weapons stock. Great! Now how do you make money off it? First, you should bear in mind that this will take you some time. It took me three months to turn a raw profit from my initial foray into the weapons trade, so make sure you're not relying on this cash and you have an emergency fund there to pay for your other Torn activities.
There are a few ways you can go about selling your wares, including selling through your own bazaar, listing your weapons on the item market, or selling directly via trade chat and the forums. Many sellers choose the bazaar option to avoid the 3% item market fee applied to all sales, but when I started out, I chose to eat these costs just to make some sales - I eventually took a job as a property broker to avoid item market fees altogether.
In my eyes, the item market is the best place to sell weapons. Few people are willing to go through hundreds of bazaars to find the best deal, and even when you arrive at a bazaar you like the look of, trawling through the seller's array of poorly ordered stock can be painful. Chedburn's planned improvements may change this one day, but for now, the item market remains the easiest place for customers to find what they need since most people are willing to look at the last two pages of listings of the weapon they want to buy.
Another aspect of selling that both buyers and sellers find difficult to deal with is mugging. This has never really been an issue for me, and I like to tell myself that it’s because people respect me so much. The truth is that high-quality items take a lot of effort and/or time to resell, so it's rare to find players who will buy-mug you when purchasing items like these - they're far more likely to buy-mug when purchasing bulk quantities of easily flippable generic items, like Xanax, or Donator Packs.
But just because these idiots are rare, it doesn't mean you won't meet them.
Scaling Up
Once you feel comfortable buying and selling weapons, you can do it on a bigger scale by dominating a certain weapon's market. If you feel like a weapon's price overall is too cheap, you can actively manipulate the market by buying up the competition in a certain quality category. This can be very lucrative if done right, as you may have seen a few months ago when motorcycle helmets rose from $8m to over $50m within the space of a year.
I have done this myself with a wide range of items, including Armas, Macanas, Kodachis, BT-MPs, and even DBKs to a certain extent. But if you don't want to risk your fortune and buy up the whole market, you can still employ price manipulation tactics by buying up a small selection instead.
Let’s say I've got a pair of 60% Metal Nunchakus which I'm yet to value. On the market, there is my own pair of 57% quality at $31m, Choco180’s 61.5% pair for $34m, and Wendy’s 62.5% for $49m. Based on this array of prices, I should try to sell my 60% pair for between $31m and $34m. And in truth, I should really lower the price of the 57% pair, because at only a $3m price difference, there is no way these can compete against the 61.5% one.
But there's a trick to use here that ensures I can make a little more money on both pairs of nunchaku. If I buy the 61.5% pair from Choco180, I can leave my 57% pair at $31m, and try to resell Choco180's pair for around $46m. If we base the pricing on mine and Wendy's items, you're looking at roughly $300k per 0.1 percentage point. This either means Choco180's valuation of $34m is way under, or my whole valuation system is wrong because Wendy's price of $49m is too high. If you're in business to make money, you may as well aim for the stars and go high.
I made Choco180 an offer of $25m directly via chat, and he accepted. Even if I sell these nunchakus for his original asking price of $34m I'd make $9m profit. And if Choco180 had wanted me to pay market price I'd still make a profit, because when I resell these nunchakus I'm going to peg their value to Wendy's prices and put them up for $46m. This means I can also keep my 57% quality pair up for sale at $31m, giving myself the potential to make profit on both items.
Then, if I take the 60% pair I mentioned earlier, these can go on at $40m based on my earlier calculations as to what would be a fair price based on Wendy's high-valued 62.5% nunchakus. Sure, Wendy's price may be a little high, but now that my prices for several items are proportional to hers, they all look a little more reasonable. And seeing as I have three nunchakus up for sale compared to Wendy's one, it is now my valuations that are determining the market, not hers.
This method doesn't always work, however, particularly if you're dealing with an item as unpopular as the Metal Nunchakus. If you are struggling to sell an item due to its low popularity, then try to find the cheapest weapon available with similar quality, and sell it just below that value. Sometimes, in business, you have to take a small loss to avoid a bigger one!
Advanced Weapons
In December 2021, advanced weapons and armors were released alongside the new ranked warring feature. I quickly realized that the market had changed overnight, with weapon types that I had never traded before suddenly becoming popular, and high-quality versions of once-popular weapons losing a great deal of value.
With more and more factions gaining caches, more and more players tried their luck in trading ranked weapons. And while some advanced arms dealers had great success, many vastly over or underestimated the value of these new items, resulting in several billions worth of losses - it really does pay to do your research!
Finding out the value of an advanced weapon or armor piece is more complicated than evaluating a standard item since there are far fewer available for comparison. Fellow weapons enthusiast masheen has a fantastic tool to help you work out the value of advanced items, and he will be talking about his methods of advanced weapon and armor analysis in a forthcoming newspaper article.
In the meantime, my rule of thumb is that if the base stats of an Advanced weapon are better than the best kind of regular weapon in the same category, the weapon will usually be valued similarly to the cache it came from. However, this rule may have to be adjusted soon, since prices are falling, but in the short term, I think you can expect to pay at least 50% of a weapon's cache's price. Here is my own personal list of the best standard weapons to use for comparison when attempting to value a piece of Advanced weaponry.
| Pistols | Qsz-92 |
| SMGs | BT-MP9 |
| Rifles | ArmaLite |
| Shotguns | Jackhammer |
| Machine Guns | M249 SAW |
| Slashing | Kodachi |
| Piecing | DBK or Macana |
| Bludgeoning | Metal Nunchakus |
For example, let's say you come across a Taurus with the Assassinate perk. While this weapon looks all fancy at first glance, a brief look at its compared to a standard Qsz-92 shows this weapon can't compete with a 64 dmg 55 acc Qsz-92 that you can buy on the item market for less than $2m. I lovingly call those weapons "crap weps", and buy them for $80m in the hopes to swap them for caches at some point, once that feature gets added.
I don't want to say too much here to avoid covering what masheen is going to investigate in his forthcoming article on advanced weapons and armors, but basically, if the stats of the weapon can compete with non-warring weapons, look at the bonus. Most people want two things from their weapons: damage and consistency. If a bonus does one or both of these, you've got yourself a fine weapon indeed.
But that doesn't mean you should sell it.
Weapon Rental
When advanced weapons dropped there was one perk that immediately caught my eye: Warlord. This bonus gives the user 15% or more increased respect with the final hit, and I loved the idea of owning multiple warlord weapons and renting them out for people to use in ranked wars.
For those of you who've been here a while, you might remember the times when PnB dominated Torn wars by owning the majority of firework stands, as these could be used to remove respect from other factions. Renting warlords is the closest I am able to get to that old glory, and so, together with PnB's bald champ MadMikeTyson, we were able to acquire 14 weapons with the warlord bonus. While we're happy with our armory at the moment, I don't think we'd be able to refuse a good deal on an 15th.
Even one weapon being rotated between members is able to influence a war significantly. Now imagine having 10 of those, or being on the receiving end of 10 warlord weapons. To rent out a warlord weapon, I insist on being sent a certain amount of collateral depending on how many weapons my customer plans on renting. This collateral consists of items and cash, and these are always returned (minus the rental fee) via a trade once the user has achieved their objectives.
Conclusion
Over time, as my business grew, I had a lot of people ask me how to trade weapons, hence why I wrote this article. I enjoy helping other traders, even if some of them would grow to be my competitors, but the friendships I made were definitely worth it. If you're one of those people who write to Aunty Torn asking her how to make money in Torn City, I hope my story has helped to answer that question.
As you'll see if you follow in my footsteps, the weapons market is far from dead, despite the introduction of advanced weapons and armors. Even now I'm seeing an increase in Arma and DBK sales, as while the rich kids fight over the orange and red weapons, the rest of Torn benefits by being able to purchase high-quality regular weapons cheaper than ever before.
Trading weapons will always be lucrative for those willing to put the work in. I am proud of the emporium I was able to build up, all of which was only possible due to weapons trading. From $400m to tens of billions worth of weapons in about 1.5 years. If that's not the
PS: If trading collateral every time you rent a warlord is too much of a hassle, take a look into my stocks fund. That way I can earn some money for both of us while you make bank slaughtering your opponents!
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