I was the same, except I targeted a different portion of the economy. I became a resource dealer. The resource spawning system drew my attention, and I ended u

I was the same, except I targeted a different portion of the economy. I became a resource dealer. The resource spawning system drew my attention, and I ended up spending countless hours developing tracking systems outside the game to both keep track of the current and past spawns as well as keep track of my harvester fleet. I knew almost immediately when the best Rhodium Steel for a particular weapon spawned and would drop every harvester on the strongest vein I could find. For those unfamiliar with the resource mechanics of SWG, there was a fixed hierarchy of resource types that different crafting recipes required. The more advanced the recipe, the more specific the resource requirement (e.g., Rhodium Steel instead of just Metal). Every couple weeks the current spawn of a given type would dry up and a new one would come along to take its place with different stats. These stats ultimately determined the final stats of items crafted with the resource. Resources also spawned in "veins" similar to how they're found in real life. The closer to the center of the spawn you were, the more yield your harvesters produced. It was possible to effectively block out any competition by placing enough harvesters on a vein, and this is exactly what I did. At one point I even started doing "contract" work for the high-end crafters. They would give me a quantity of a resource they wanted and I would deliver it daily as the harvesters collected. At the end (sometime around when the Jedi questing was introduced) I had amassed enough credits that I was within the top 5-10 on the server I played. I sold it all on eBay and more than paid for my time playing.