Disclaimer: I'm not quite sure if people are aware of this because I tried to search for similar posts or videos and failed to find anything really.

Trading. To elaborate before you skip the whole post, it's not about Dike or any other traders but rather about reselling items in the free market. Sometimes being a macroeconomics fan is paying off in the most unpredictable life situations, like being not the best fpv shooter.

From what I have noticed there's a certain seasonality of goods in Arena Breakout, and I tried to draw connection between some of the factors. For example, let's say it's the start of the week (graph attached). Then:

Demand shifters, that I consider:

1. Prices of Related Goods - as all the cases and mission rewards are reset at the beginning of the week, people get a bunch of free weapons, armour etc. I'd consider weapons to be complements to ammo and armour in some way to be complement good to weapon. As prices of complement goods go down by cases, demand should shift to the right.
2. Income of Buyers - by the same logic, buyer's income go up due to missions, even more shift to the right.
3. Number of consumers - it goes down, because people tend to play more on the weekends. It's hard to measure but I think it's not that big of a factor. As there's no steam data yet, I compared twitch viewers and stream activity that show no significant difference over the course of the week. So, a shift to the left but not that impactful, so overall we stay with shift to the right.

Supply shifters, that I consider:

1. Market Size - it's kinda similar to the # of consumers, so not that much of an impact but here it gets difficult because some people hit market cap and are excluded from selling on the weekend. They enter the market again here. It's debatable whether that cancels out # of consumers impact. Anyway I consider these to be less significant. Shifts to the right.

Result: We have an increase in the price at the start of the week. I usually notice it during Tue/Wed when prices are at the peak over the weekend.

https://preview.redd.it/lq0goov6rhrd1.png?width=637&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f1cc5f19cbe46dbbe3ff981a80ebce8051073a3

The same can be applied to a day "seasonality". Here it's much easier as we can eliminate most of the factors except the number of people. Over the day it plays a bigger role since a lot of people play only in the evening while it's not that powerful tendency if we take Mon to Sun. I decided not to make a graph for because changes are the same if we consider End of the Day:

1. Demand is shifted to the right because a lot of players enter in the evening.
2. Supply is slioghtly shifter to the right because more people sell too. It's not that impactful due to 12/24h periods on selling. So, # of buyers is a bigger thing to evaluate.

Result: Prices are at the peak at the very end of the day.

Ok, but how do I earn money with all of this nonsense?

The best item to buy is ammo. It's in abundance, it's luiqud and easy to sell and it's related to weapon prices. I used to buy ammo in the middle of the day on the weekends and sell on Tue/Wed at the end of the day with crazy margins. My favourite picks are 7.62x54 7BT1, 7.62x51 M62, and 5.56x45 M995. For example, if you buy (and I did it) 120 of 7.62x54 7BT1 for 1215 and sell it for 1750 you earn more than 49500 koen. I cannot operate exact profit figures because comissions are different depending on the item and price but it's around 7-9% overall. The same goes for armour and some other items but the are harder to sell, I did no analysis and if you buy armour you must first go to raid with it before selling. See my second chart with ammo attached (some figures are not exactly right because I played around with estimations, but it's mostly what I actually earned for the first time I tried this. For example DVC sum is combined there. I reiterated the scheme many times without taking notes further)

https://preview.redd.it/qqvooyq1uhrd1.png?width=784&format=png&auto=webp&s=5be3cea088b3fffc4d7e5e2ff24c28ebdc662636

Like that, I managed to earn 22kk koen without ratting, without going with just a shotgun, and without being mad due to losing my T5 set. I play to get fun, not to earn koen. I mean, of course sometimes I get my lucky raids, but I don't save on anything at this point. I buy my favoutite weapons, armours, kits etc. without a fear of losing them.

AMA. I 100% sure that there are huge holes in my theory but it works... or at least worked for me.

P.S In the recent weeks there's a bad trend of pricing being almost the same. When I try to refresh prices at certain times I can see thousands of ammos being put in the market for probably price regulation. While not being the biggest fan of Smith's Invisible Hand, I hate this kind of behavior from the developers. Not because I can't earn anymore. I can survive on my money while slightly in the loss after raids for a long time. I'm mad because they try to create a vision of the free market and then shut it because people can use it for their benefit. It is literally the reason behind free market. Several days ago tier 5 Mosin ammo was MORE EXPENSIVE tham tier 6 Mosin ammo because most people just don't care about comparing obvious things. If I can be better off because of this, I see nothing wrong, and so should developers.