QUESTION

Where can I find exchange brokers in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes? How do they work?

ANSWER

In each capital city in Vanguard you¡¯ll find exchange brokers. These brokers are an important element to the game. Players use brokers to trade goods with other players. They are usually near the bank in any major city and can be found by hailing a guard and asking for directions. The brokers allow you to have items for sale while you are playing or offline, alleviating the tedium of standing around trying to sell them to passersby.

Most items can be sold via the brokers, including crafted items, harvested materials, and loot drops. Items not allowed on brokers include no-drop items such as those that are part of a quest, or soul bound items.

Buying From a Broker

Once you find the exchange broker for your area hail him or right click to begin a transaction.  Select the “I would like to browse the local market.” conversation point, and you?re in. If you know the name of a specific item you are searching for, you may enter it and search. Or if you know the name of a seller whose wares you¡¯d like to browse you can search that way.

If you¡¯re not looking for a specific item or seller, you have many options to find what we desire. First, select the sphere related to the item you want.  This is important to limit the number of items your search returns. There are other drop-down menus that allow you to set search parameters. The main ones I use are: Sphere, Class, Slot and Rarity. If you want to see everything adventure related for your class, then you would leave out slot and rarity. Also, if I find an Item that I like, for example: Murk Leather Leggings, I will restart my search by placing “Murk Leather” in the Item name field and see if there are more pieces to that set. You can also narrow down a search to a specific item to easily compare prices from different vendors.

Selling Via a Broker

Now you know the basics of finding items on the Broker. What about selling them?  For that you will need to use the “Your Market Items” tab. Here you can add items you would like to sell on the open market.

There are many philosophies on “playing the market.” Before you sell an item, you¡¯ll want to do a search to see how others have priced the item you want to sell. If you cannot find that item, you may try looking for an item around the same level/quality, or from the same armor set (like my ¡°Murk Leather¡± example above.) If you can find that item, then you have a few options: 1.) sell around the same price as the majority; 2.) sell below everyone else to get a quicker sale; or 3.) take some average in between the low-balls and the greed-mongers.

The key to playing the broker market well is to watch the market daily and see what is selling, and then use that as a basis to decide where you should place your price. If an item is selling well, then it¡¯s worth your time to price it a bit higher and wait for it to sell. Otherwise, it?s better to just low-ball. (*Wink, wink! Nudge, nudge!*) If you really feel you want to get involved in playing the market, you may even purchase the low-ballers, and then sell higher. There is much more risk involved in this method, but if done well it is one way to gain wealth.

The one caveat is that you can only list 10 items on any given broker at one time. If you want to hop from city to city, you can list 10 items on each broker in the game, but that involves a good bit of travel. You can also use alt characters to mule items.

So, now you know where to find a broker, and how to use them. It?s time to go play the market and earn your fortune. See you on Woefeather. Perhaps you can buy me a horse!