Making Money In Alter Aeon
Technically there are all sorts of different ways to make gold, but not many ways to have a steady flow of gold coming in. I've heard people say run equipment and sell it, kill mobs, start a shop, or craft for people. All of these can make you some gold from time to time, but they aren't solid ways to make gold by any means. From my first hand experience there are really only two ways to make gold, and they are very class specific. They are more than enough of a reason to start a second character though, and at least in one of the cases it is a very simple thing to do.
Selling Souls As a Necro
I always had issues maintaining a decent amount of gold, that was until I started a necro character. If you are active, it is quite easy to pull in thousands of gold in a short period of time as a high level necro. It does involve a lot of work, you have to be active and stealing a lot, but it can really pay off if you have soul buyers.
In my experience it is easier to sell in bulk to a player instead of through the soul market. The soul market is limited in the amount you can sell, and though it can be good sometimes, the price drops too low for my liking quite often. You don't only have to sell for what the going rate is on the market, but also what the souls are worth to you as a necro. The trick to making gold from souls is not selling too low. A lot of people will try and offer you well under the buy price on the soul market, and taking that just means you are not getting the true worth of your souls. A good way to determine a fair price is to add the sell price and buy price together and then divide by two. This gives you a perfect middle of the road price. If someone doesn't accept this price, then just don't sell, the price will go up eventually and you can sell then, or you can just use them yourself.
Something I've seen people do is auto-sell to the market. There is a hidden config option for this in mush-z,, and it is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. You are just throwing away souls for what could be a rock bottom price. It is always better to hold onto the souls, forge them all into deep blues or purples, and put them in storage. I did this and made 400k off my saved up purples in one day.
The trick is balancing what you need verses wanting to make gold. Even if you only have a necro character for making gold, you still need souls for your minions, and you should be using purples up to level 33 or so, then nothing but clears in your skeletons after that. This takes quite a bit, but also means you can get more kills faster in higher level areas, and that's the key to really harvesting souls fast. Just make sure to always have a stock of the souls you use which aren't for sale. I'd suggest 100 purples, or 50 clears in reserve. This way you'll always be able to put up minions, even after a weekend of restarts.
Finally this is probably the easiest way to make gold fast. Necro is by far the easiest class to level up and play even at a high level. I had a necro character over total 100 levels in under a week. I don't play necro much anymore just because it is so easy and I prefer a bit of a challenge. It is great for gold though, and quite easy to get to the point where you can support both selling and using high level souls.
Stealing Gold As a Thief
This is the second option, and one which definitely takes more work than leveling up a necro character. The amount of gold you can get is pretty decent though, it can just be tedious when you have been stealing for two hours straight on a run through cities and towns. You'll also have to work on not only leveling up your character, but also leveling up all the stealing skills. You'll also want a dexterity of at least 33 with equipment on, or you can expect to get caught quite a bit.
When going out on a stealing run as a thief you want to be wearing all thief skill equipment, and have your dexterity maxed at +8, or more if you are over level 34. It's best to plan out where you want to steal ahead of time, and then go through the different locations, stealing from every mob on each map. And yes you need to steal, not pickpocket. Pickpocket use to work in old Alter days, but now it is almost useless unless you want to get between 1 and 6 gold per attempt. It is still usable, but you can get muchmore by stealing gold directly .
The tedious part is looking to see what mob is in each room, then typing 'steal gold mob name' for each one. This can be shortened to something like sg mob name with an alias, but it is still tedious having to check the name of every mob before stealing. When doing this over and over for a dozen maps your brain starts to go a bit mushy, but you can feel better knowing you grabbed a few thousand gold each run.
Extra Ways To Make Gold
People like to say do jobs for gold. I guess this is a way to make some gold yes, but the same amount you could get for selling one soul stone or stealing from one or two mobs. I never did jobs for gold, or really for any reason at all. It can help though if jobs are your type of thing, and if you are a cleric you'll be doing them for favor anyway.
People also like to say go kill mobs for gold. I usually just turn off a channel when this comes up, this way I don't call people names. The thing is yes you get gold from mobs, but you get very little and even after running 100 million EXP you might have two or three thousand gold from the kills. This is not a way to make gold, it is a side-effect of killing mobs. You can get some yes, but relying on this as a way to make gold is not smart.
My most disliked way to make gold is with the money market and credits. It feels too much like pay to win, but it's there nevertheless, and can be useful if you need some gold quick for something. If you type in the command ''money market' you'll get the info on how to use it for trading gold for credits or vice versa. I have the ability to type in a command and have 1 million gold, but I choose not to because it feels cheap to me. It is a way if that's your way of playing though.
Conclusion
There isn't a way to get rich fast, but there are ways to get rich over a period of time. No matter how you do it takes quite a bit of effort and time to build up a padded bank account. Just remember, once you have over one million gold you'll be taxed for everything over. You can use the command 'help tax' to see the rates. So be successful and make some gold, but don't be too successful or you'll have to beg your clan owner to let you stash gold.