best way to make credits?

[Arkanine]

i must b doing something wrong I have 8 mill but it took forever .How are people affording some of these ships on sale in the exchange.

[Blakmage86]

Its people that have played forever and have everything already that they want. Most players dont have 8mil ec sitting around. If you are a free player you cap out at 10mil

[praxian2012]

It's not that hard actually, although it can be time consuming.

What I did to build up credits was what I did when I first started. I started this month and my first weekend was the double-xp weekend (well, end of last month, they were still dropping cardassian boxes).

I grinded out from roughly lvl 11 to 50 in the Starbase 24 missions non-stop the entire first week more or less. I did the missions up to lvl 11 and then just grinded SB24 up to 50.

During that time I was in nothing but pugs, but made the point of doing need on all loot (yes, I was a needy groupie, but I also legitimately had no money at that time and needed everything I got for upgrades), and then when my inventory filled up went to the exchange and compared prices. Mark down 5k to 10k on the items you sell and if you get a better price than the discarding it, do that on the exchange. everyone is looking for cheap upgrades on their equipment.

You'll get some good equipment through there too! Like one piece of equipment I got was common loot (white) but was worth 1 million EC's! Blew my mind. I marked it way down (sold it @ 350k) and it sold within an hour.

When everything was said and done, on Sunday, the end of the double-xp weekend, I had 2.9 million credits and was level 50.

It should be noted I didn't start grinding sb-24 missions until the start of the double-xp weekend, so it took me 3 days to grind up to 50 in there -and- 99% of the loot from the mission is what made me all my money.

It takes time, but my advice, look at the whites, but only target the blues and purples to sell - they'll give you the most bang for your buck in the exchange.

Long story short, the Exchange is the key.

[greasemonkey98]

If you have 8 million EC's be proud! I don't have currently have or have I ever had 8 million! You are doing pretty well for yourself!

Another method that you can use that is equally time consuming, but less of a headache as far as PuGs and loot is to resell items from the exchange. Sometimes people place items on the exchange at below 50% of their value. Buy those items and sell them to a vendor. Any vendor that has the "Sell" tab will give you 50% of an items value. It sometimes takes some mental math and you might not make that much money per item, but this is something you can do when you don't have that much time. I mostly look toward the higher value items like engines, ship shields and come consoles.

Another thing to remember is not to use the "recycle" function in the replicator or to "discard" an item, as that only gives you around 40% of the items value. Always use a vendor to get rid of loot.

[Kairu]

Me personally? I used Praxian's method. As soon as I good, I set the game to Advanced difficulty. That way it's not overly difficult but not ridiculously easy either. In turn, the better loot rate went up. Blue quality items became a common item over green and whites, while purple was still pretty rare, it wasn't as rare as other difficulties. I also made sure I stayed with one ship per rank up to Level 50 and ran the same setup and upgraded as I went along according to the ship. In turn, from all of the missions that give decent loot that I never used or needed, I sold on the exchange for about "little more than half its worth" kind of mindset. That way I knew I'd be getting a better chance of people buying what I was selling. And I also made more ECs than selling it to a vendor or discarding. If I felt an item was too worthy for the general public I dropped it in the fleet bank because, hey, I'm a nice guy And if items were white quality, I'd usually just discard them. I've never been a fan of paying 300k ECs for a single green deflector. Granted my method takes a little more time, but it's a fail-proof method

[Warburton1881]

I use a combination of methods to make ECs. Mainly, I periodically check out the Exchange for under priced or overpriced items. If I find a bunch of items (usually personal equipment or weapons) that are selling for less than half their nominal value, I buy all that I can and carry them down the hall to the nearest vendor and sell them for an instant profit. If I find items selling for outrageous prices I look for a way to craft one or get it as a reward, then I post it on the exchange for a little less than the lowest price listed. (If you price it much below the lowest displayed price, it may or may not show up on the Exchange at all. The Exchange is, and for a long time has been, broken.) Another trick is to look for an item in different ways (check "All" then check the specific categories. Sometimes the prices will be as much as ten times higher on one or the other.) Buy the item at the cheapest price, then set the Exchange to a listing where the prices are higher and resell it there. It works about eighty to ninety percent of the time and can result in profits of 100% to 1000%. Sometimes my sales expire and the items come back to me, but I simply re-list them at the best available prices. I've made millions of ECs that way for all of my toons. I don't know how much I've made overall because I've spent most of the ECs on things I was having trouble finding elsewhere, but most of my toons now have five million or more ECs and some have eleven or twelve million.