Making money with Duty Officers without playing poker.

In Season 5 of Star Trek Online, Cryptic introduced the Duty Officer system. I love this part of the game; its quick, its easy, and is perfect for lunch breaks. With various categories to focus on, assignments varying by sector, and the timed nature of it, DOFFs are a fascinating way to progress your character (and crew) while offline, to have an alternative means of leveling, and just provide a great flavor to the game. Moreover, its how I've been doing the vast majority of my Dilithium Earning.

"But what if I don't like DOFFs?"


Well, fair enough. Some people prefer a more active gaming experience, and STO already provides that in two wonderful flavors.You can get DOFFs during gameplay, but if you don't find it fun, what do they offer you? Not much, right?

Actually not! If you go to the Exchange, a quick search will find that your Duty Officers can be sold to other players. Sometimes they're relatively low in price - 10,000 EC - and sometimes they're ten times that, reaching near 100k! Duty Officer packs can be sold for 250k EC.

In the past week or so, my seldom used Ferengi Engineer has been parked at Star Fleet Academy, picking up Recruitment assignments. After a few nights of pretty much ignoring him, I complete the assignments, get the rewards, and go get more. Tonight? I just put a whole bunch up on the Exchange, and before I signed off on him had already collected 370k EC! These are not Uncommons or Rares, but Commons!

As always, I try to under-sell the competition by a few thousand EC. Everyone needs Commons, it costs me nothing to get them, so I figure there's no need to try and get top dollar here. The key here is volume. Now, some categories of DOFFs bring in more, but even then I'm still trying to undercut. If folks are selling for 90k, then I'm happy to sell for 80k or even 70k. I'll sell it, and my investment cost is nil. Besides, the more people doing DOFFs and having fun, the better for me and the game, right? Especially if they need to expand their DOFF capacity from 200 to something higher - they might buy my Zen when I sell, or just buy straight from the Z-Store which puts money into Cryptic's pocket.

To date I've brought in over 2 million EC this way. I could get more, but I'm not terribly aggressive on this, nor do I see a need to be. As such, I think its a nice, slow and steady way to get EC, while making it a win/win for both myself and my buyers. Goodness knows there were 20 players who benefitted from me going on a buying spree when I bought 20 Diplomats! And, thanks to them, my main character is now sitting around with "Federation Ambassador" over his head (Tier 4 Diplomatic title).