UberGuy

Where did this even come from? This shows colossal ignorance.

They aren't off for three weeks. At best, they're probably off for two days. But they very likely did not want to release I19 on Tuesday when they would then be off two days later, with a bunch of people playing and possibly getting PO'd when XYZ turned out to be broken with no devs around to even look into it for four days.

They missed the target of Tuesday last week. The holiday this week means they have to move it to Tuesday next week. There's no three-week vacation involved.

Actually, this is the Market and Inventions forum. He had a question about how an IO worked, so it's totally the right place for that post.

As far as I know, everyone who gave feedback thought it was a monumentally dumb choice to merge the market and Inventions forums because the topics are so divergent in so many ways, but the powers that be merged them anyway.

Those would be wonderful counter examples of the argument going on with Max_Zero if they were examples of what's being discussed.

Buying up the supply and witholding it is not flipping. Flipping is buying stuff and taking everything you buy and selling it at some higher price.

Because, of course, no one who disagrees with him could possibly be honest or forthright. It's absolutely impossible that they have conviction born of in-game experience with what they are saying.

The above is nothing but your biases, painted broadly across anyone you commonly disagree with - which is just about everyone here. You regularly show an inability to successfully argue your way out of a kleenex, but you try to leave every argument with a post steeped in self-assurance that you definitely "won". So you wander into this conversation armed primarily with a personal axe to grind against the posters who regularly disagree with you and try to convince a newcomer that we're all irrational and/or liars.

Frankly, your axe-grinding has come to disgust me, and I'm sick of reading it. I unignored you months ago, and it was clearly a mistake.

If the flipper is not there then there is no force bringing the price ceiling down. It may drift around naturally over time, but that's effectively random motion.

Edit: and I have to leave for work.

I would probably list for something like 31.55M, which means someone might buy it for 32, which is a downward pressure on the market. But I'm not a flipper, and no flippers would hang out in the environment implied by consistent 35M prices. If my lowball listing precipitated a new gap, a flipper might come back and work off that gap again. My sale is just one price in the trend, and while it might "unstick" a stuck price that's actually too high compared to what the market will bear, I am not sure it would start a true downward trend. If 35M is the price the market really "likes" 35M, sales will tend to oscillate around it a bit, and my lowball listing probably would just be a point on the scatter graph.

They make their inf on the difference in the price ceiling and the price floor, not on the price median/average/whatever increasing.

When the gap between the ceiling and the floor shrinks too much, the flipper leaves. When all the flippers leave, the price gap starts wandering wider again, and eventually the flipper(s) come back.

But it does not follow that this raises the average price. It only follows that it raises the floor and eventually lowers the ceiling (for reasons I explained earlier).

I just don't feel you've shown at all that there are costs in play here. The only "cost" I've seen is the one to the bargain hunter who is hoping to pay a price below the average (or whatever collapse method) price.

I'm one of those bargain hunters. I'm not a flipper. I sell what I get as drops aiming for high prices and I try to buy at low-ball prices. I'm one of the people that flipping impacts, arguably negatively, and I have no issue with them doing it. Why? Because I'm competing with them for those bids, and if they out-bid me, they win. What they do with the spoils is up to them.

Hmm. I'm not sure I believe that. Multiple flippers drive faster high/low price convergence on the equilibrium, but I'm not sure it provides particularly strong force to lower the equilibrium value.

They provide some overall downward pressure by increasing the number of market fees in the transaction chain, but I suspect that's a very weak, long-term effect even if prices are sufficiently out of equilibrium with the money supply for fees to drive price change.

No worries. I don't expect real-time communications on the forums.

They are, but again that doesn't imply that they're raising the overall price trend. The 30M inf purchase doesn't exist in a vacuum. There have to be other, higher prices in play or the flipper wouldn't even be in the picture. What the flipper did was potentially buy that IO from a bargain hunter. Those people have to pay a higher market price or wait longer. If the bargain hunter was bidding 29M, they now have to pay 3% more. If the bargain hunter was bidding 20M, they may have been in for a long wait anyway, whether or not a flipper came along.

Understood, but it does matter from a larger argument perspective. What happens to individual sales is not compelling when discussing what market activity does to price trends. The overall trend of all sales have to be considered, and that includes other actors than the bargain hunter and the flipper. As I've mentioned, a flipper will set their sale price based on other existing sale prices - in our example of buying at 30M and selling at 50M, a flipper wouldn't pick a price of 50M unless people were already making sales at 55M or so. (Honestly, an experienced flipper would never choose a round number like that. They would look for sales at 55M and list for 53.51 or something. But the point stands that a flipper is going to set a sale price beneath existing sales history or longer trend maxima.)

The primary claim I've see and that I accept as reasonable is that it flipping promotes market throughput at more stable prices. In my opinion, the market's greatest practical utility is as a pseudo-storage device. What I mean by that is if I get some rare drop X that I don't need right now, I want to be able to sell it on the market right now to get money for something I do want and have some confidence that, if I want to buy X again later, I will find one for sale in a reasonable period of time. Having consistent sales activity helps guarantee that. It doesn't give me any guarantees about the price I'll find, but at least it suggests there will be activity and also suggests a locally consistent price trend.

And there's no guarantee there would be anything there to buy, period, because someone may have bought it before you.

You seem to be mixing statistical and instantaneous views of the process. For example, bouncing between discussion of price floors, ceilings and averages/medians to discussions of what happens with single sales.

That one? Sure, assuming it sells at 50M.

What about the ones people were already selling for 55 or 60M? A flipper wouldn't pick a sale price of 50M out of thin air.

Reselling something at a higher price is not the same thing as "raising the price" unless you're the only sales actor on the market.

That's not the question I asked you. I asked you to quote where someone said that flippers lowered prices. You made the claim that people said that, and that you were rebutting that claim. I'm asking you to point out what you were rebutting, because I don't see where it was said.

I'm open to the idea that I didn't look hard enough, but only if you can actually point it out to me. I'd hope, since you're rebutting it, that you know offhand generally where it was claimed.

That looks like a case of affirming the consequent. What you just said does not support the claim made.

I addressed that. There is no guarantee that the sales will continue at the "buy it now" price. I sell enough stuff to know that's not remotely guaranteed. I list things lower than that and while I still make the high end sale plenty often I also find someone buys my good just above my sale price plenty often, too. We marvel on this forum regularly about how often people will overpay, but that doesn't mean it always happens.

In the very short term, if everyone who buys continues to pay "buy it now" prices, yes, they can raise the short term average price. Over the longer run of 10, 20, 50 sales? It's extremely unlikely.

I'm not guessing about this. I sell a lot of stuff, and I sell at the same kinds of prices a flipper would use, because like them I want to both maximize sale price and minimize time-to-sale. What you're describing doesn't match my experience.

I wonder if you would directly quote where someone told you that, because I reviewed the last couple pages (at 50 posts per page) and didn't find that claim. The closest thing I saw is that multiple flippers raises sale competition which accelerates price collapse, which is not the same thing as saying it lowers the price. (Just the price ceiling.)

I never said they don't touch the top end. I said they don't raise it. A flipper tends to collapse the low and high prices towards one another. A flipper hopes people buy their product at the highest price out there, but they list at a lower price in order to promote that their item is the one bought. If anyone actually notices that, the top-end price trends downwards.

You misunderstand. The claim is not that the flipper personally adds supply. The claim is that the flipper's activity attracts more sellers. Market instability dissuades sellers. Easily viewable price trends in the sale history make sellers who are not avid marketeers more prone to list their good at that trend price. They feel more confident that they can pick out a price that neither leaves them with an overpriced item nor sells for far less than its current worth.

What? What are you even talking about?

In order to sell goods, a flipper has to buy them. If they bid for 1 inf, they won't buy anything. They have to outbid other buyers. If I'm a flipper and there's another flipper, I have to outbid that other flipper to buy stuff. The other flipper is also selling, and if I want my purchases to sell, I have to undercut his sale price. If no one ever bid creeps to find our sale prices, then no, it won't matter. As a fairly high volume seller I can tell you that doesn't always happen near the price ceiling, and just one sale undercutting your sale price can leave you with a stack of inventory you can't sell for weeks or months.

You spent all that space posting nothing new except the links to the definition of rent. After that, you went on to repeat things that have already been discussed in the thread. You showed only that a flipper raises the price floor, not the price that lies somewhere statistically between the price floor and price ceiling. You did not show that the flipper raises either the ceiling or the average/median/equilibrium value (choose whatever trend collapse method best fits). The current price floor, or any low-ball price that happens along for that matter, is not the item's "going rate" in market terms. It's a part of a statistical clump of data moving around some other number.

If the flipper did not change that number, then they did not cause inflation. Nothing you posted addressed that, and everything I just said above has already been discussed.

Alchemical Silver is in something of a unique position. It's a highly demanded component for practical use (see below), and its normal supply levels (outside of any player activity shifts) are relatively low because it is mid-level salvage. This makes it a very attractive target for marketeers - alchemical silver is quite possibly the most flipped or otherwise tinkered with salvage on the market, and whole threads and activity campaigns have centered around its market activity.

Non-marketeering reasons people seek Alchemical Silver:

• It is used in common Accuracy IOs L30-40.
• It is used in common Defense IOs L30-40.
• Level 30 Accuracy and Defense IOs are crafting elements which grant a badge for additional salvage storage.
• Level 30 IOs are the first IO tier that exceeds even-level SO performance.
• A significant fraction of powers in the game call for Accuracy slotting

Combine this with the historical comparative rarity of Arcane salvage compared to Tech salvage on the hero market the comparative rarity of low- and mid-level salvage to high-level salvage, and Alchemical Silver exists in a sort of perfect storm of supply and demand. This attracts many marketeers.

Thus, I believe that the outstanding number of bids you see represent a large number of players who are bidding on multiple 10-stacks per character of AS for both IO crafting and marketeering purposes. AS attracts more of this activity than probably any other common salvage available.

Honestly, I didn't comment on it because, under the circumstances, that number of bids seemed rather normal to me.

Supply is very low compared to demand. Prices are being determined by people with the deepest pockets, who are bidding what are historically enormously large amounts in order to get piece of the available supply very quickly or to try and ensure that they buy the very next piece to be posted. The lower purchase prices are all "round" numbers, which experienced market users rarely employ, suggesting they are not purchaes by flippers (who usually use odd-ball numbers, never "round" ones ending in zeroes).

Bear in mind that ~1M inf is relatively small pocket change for many people who frequently play level 50 characters, being the fruits of around 10 minutes of play for a reasonably mature character playing normal content on moderately high difficulty settings. If someone with access to that sort of Inf generation needs an Alchemical Silver for something and want it right now, paying 1M inf for one during a supply drought it may have low opportunity cost compared to waiting until later to craft whatever they want. Thus, while historically very high, ~1M inf prices for mid-level salvage is not outrageous during a supply drought.

Most importantly, there is something going on in the AE right now that is draining people away from standard content. People playing in the AE don't produce common salvage as a rule of thumb - they tend to spend their tickets on the "good stuff". They also produce Inf. Producing money but no salvage means you have people with money who need salvage. Market supply decreases and you have even more Inf than usual chasing what's left.

Whenever you see common salvage supplies get low accross the board and prices dramatically rise and stay that way for an extended period, suspect the AE. That pattern has been manifest in every example of abnormal rewards there of which I'm aware.