Diablo II - Why MF?
by Flatty

After spending a long time in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction setting up my perfect magic find characters, a thought struck me. While I was doing magic find runs all along, I was also spending a fair amount of time in the trade channels to acquire the goods I needed as well. I realized that I made a far greater "profit" spending a day trading than I ever could doing endless magic find runs. By knowing the Diablo II market, IE, what is worth how many sojs, you can easily find the naive or desperate trader and take advantage. There have been days where I've traded 2 sojs for an item and then turned around and traded it away for 15. If I really put the effort into this, I could probably do this every day. This made me ask myself, "Why do I magic find?"

As a long time fan of rare items, the idea came to me that I can MF not for the potential uniques and sets that drop, but instead for the possibility of getting a really nice rare item. But wait. Since version 1.09 of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, rares have received a huge nerf, rendering 99% of them useless. This left me with nothing that I truly magic find for. I tried to think up more reasons to legitimatize all of the wealth I had spent equipping my magic find characters, but I simply couldn't come up with a good reason.

The simple fact is that if you have a small amount of starting capital, you can spend a miniscule amount of time in the trade channels and soon become "rich" beyond your wildest dreams. All you need are a few skills:

1. Being able to read scrolling text really fast. Those trade channels are full of people, all hawking their wares. You have to read through massive amounts of text and pick out which trades seem worthwhile pursuing. All I can say is that practice makes perfect, so do it often.

2. Know how to haggle. If you can bump just 1 or 2 sojs off of someones asking price, you're doing yourself a great service. The other day, I had someone offer 14 sojs for a couple poison charms. I kept telling him that "my friend really likes one of those charms and doesn't want to trade it away"... he ended up offering 16, then 18, then 20 sojs. Finally, I asked him to bump it to 22, and he agreed to 21. That's 7 more sojs for only a minute or two of work. It's all about judging how interested people are in your item and how badly they need it.

3. Never give up. If at first you can't find any cheap items or no one wants what you're offering, don't give up. Just keep spamming your message into the trade channels and eventually it'll be come upon by the right eyes.

4. Don't be a big spender. I have the problem that whenever I acquire a large amount of "wealth" I blow it all on a big item. This isn't a good idea. Use your large amount of wealth to keep increasing your wealth. It'll grow exponentially then. In theory, of course. I'm just greedy.

That's really about all. I apologize if I've ruined anyone's MF'ing experience, but the true wealth lies in those channels with those 10 year olds who don't understand a capitalist system.