Berzerker_NA

I'm going to use Yomo_Kimyata's definitions from here out. I meant to say that there were approximately 2700 offers out when I started, and I snatched up about 1400 of them with bids under 3000 inf. There were between 1200 and 1300 left after the first night. The number has been dwindling since then as genuine bidders buy out the more expensive stuff. Meanwhile, I clear out all the low offers.

That's fine with me. I've been filling up my buy slots with offers under the vendor price. So far I've carried over 200 of them over to the vendor to make room to set up more low offers.



The 3000 is not less than the vendor price. The vendor price is 1000. I just did that as a one time thing to clear them out, and I post short-lived bids at that price when I log on just to make sure they're still cleared out. All my standing bids are much lower than 1k.

I agree. This is actually the best solution. I started a second experiment seeing if that would work, and it did work very well. I have a toon assigned to buy human blood samples at 1000 and sell them at 20,000. It's not a huge profit for me, but it prevents anyone else from being able to raise the price above 20,000. I'd set it even lower, but I'm mostly just trying to safeguard the price so it doesn't reach absurd levels like 200,000 like it's been doing from time to time over the last few weeks.

If everyone who's feeling civic minded would choose a type of salvage, and assign a toon to safeguarding it, the problem I'm all concerned about would probably go away. I still find I've made about a million inf every time I log onto that toon. It's small potatoes, but I'm certainly not losing money.

Actually, in blatant hypocrisy, I started one two days ago just to prove my point. Won't tell you which salvage type I'm targeting...... though maybe I should take a few screenshots.

With two inactive toons, and just over 1 million inf invested so far, I was able to clean out all standing offers under 3k inf. The total number of standing offers when I started was over 2700. It's now between 1200 and 1300. By the end of next week I think you'll see the effects.

Right now I just have to sit back and wait for genuine bidders to clear out those last 1200 offers I don't want to waste my own money on. I'm snapping up all the offers that list below vendor price.

The problem is that the people who are not in a hurry to sell are not active toons. The patient ones are marketeer toons that only log on for a few minutes a day to change their auction settings. Marketeers have exponentially more inventory space available to them than active players do, so patience is a luxury that costs them nothing.

The best way to sum up the problem is ..... imagine an auction where 200 people show up who are only willing to pay 5 bucks for an once of gold, and 10 people show up who are willing to pay 500 bucks for an ounce of gold. At WW..... if one person puts out a bulk bid for 200 ounces of gold at 5 bucks each, but 10 people each put out single bids at 500 bucks an ounce, the market sees 200 low bids vs. 10 high bids.

In a situation where the will of 10 people is being subverted by 1 person, that 1 person will have an enjoyable experience, and the 10 will not. Do you see how that's a bad business model for an MMO?

Except most of the time when you see 200 bidders, they are not 200 separate bidders. That's one player using 2 or 3 toons to set up a bulk bid.




They're not trying to ruin my day. They're just trying to make money and inadvertently ruining it.

The problem is that very few people are ruining very many days. Accident or no accident, it really should have a stop put to it.

I haven't been very clear. Impatience is not the problem. Patience is. Ideally everyone would be equally impatient to finish their transactions, but a certain loophole in the game makes it so certain people don't have to be impatient. Marketeers can alt their way to having massive available storage space.

Making the game fun for players who primarily focus on going out and killing stuff is my objective. Players who primarily focus on killing stuff run out of salvage space fast, because they're getting salvage drops. They also run out of market space, because those 30 salvage items usually aren't all the same kind. It's not uncommon to show up at WW with over 20 different salvage types in your inventory, and only about 5 minutes to spare before your team will want to start the next mission.

The game was, and has always been geared toward collaborative play. There's a reason Task Forces require X number of players to start them.


So now let's look at the two kinds of buyers:

Buyer Type 1 ) - An active toon making recipes.

Type 1 doesn't buy any more salvage than exactly what they need for the recipes in their possession. Why? Because their salvage storage would fill up too fast if they did that. Bulk bidding makes it harder to fit the things you need.

Buyer Type 2) - A Marketeer looking to manipulate the market.

Type 2 isn't trying to make recipes. They can afford to cram their entire storage up with just one type of item. Bulk bidding is the optimal strategy, because there isn't always a bidder around when a seller decides to list something, and most active toon sellers will take whatever price they can get rather than delete salvage to make room for new drops.

Now let's look at the two types of sellers:

Seller Type 1) - An active toon trying to make room in their inventory.

Type 1's priority is getting back into the action. The only way they would have time to wait for salvage to sell overnight is if they had unlimited transaction space at WW. Otherwise, they need those transaction slots to open up quickly so they cram more salvage and recipes into them quickly, in order to keep up with the drop rate.

The alternative would be to run 1-5 missions per session, then stop playing until tomorrow so all your salvage can sell. However, that really sucks, if you enjoy playing the character and it's the weekend, and you normally have to work all day. (People with jobs are the best kind of customers for an MMO to market to, because they have money.)


Seller Type 2) - A marketeer with lots of inventory space

Type 2 is no hurry to sell. They can patiently wait until boredom (not a good feeling for players to experience in an MMO) or desperation drives an IO maker to just give in and pay up.


The problem right now is that Buyer Type 1 and Seller Type 1 are often unable to connect with each other. Seller Type 1 is in a hurry, and post their salvage at whatever price they can get right now (because it's not fun to wait, and games are supposed to be fun). If they're very lucky, a Buyer Type 1 also just happens to have an active bid up just that very second. If they're not lucky (and most won't be), the next player to post a bid will be a Buyer Type 2. (Or rather, a standing bulk bid will be the most readily available.)


Buyer Type 1 is in a bit of a hurry, but not at severely as Seller Type 1. Buyer type 1 can wait a little while, but their salvage needs are very diverse (because recipes have diverse requirements), so they can't spare a lot of market slots or they'd be busy making those recipes for a long time. (Also they might be planning to go do fun stuff like killing mobs during the same session, rather than devoting 5+ hours to just sitting at WW.)

If a lot of people are on, and Buyer Type 1 is patient enough wait just a few minutes, they can post a bid at a reasonable price and the next Seller Type 1 will sell to them. Fine, but if there were 10 Seller Type 1's on during the next few minutes, and they all list for 5 inf each, and a Buyer Type 2 is present, then 9 of those Seller Type 1's will end up selling to eh Buyer Type 2, and only 1 will connect with the Buyer Type 1.


Analysis:

Buyer Type 1 experiences the market as though there were only a few Seller Type 1's (when in fact there are many of them.)

Seller Type 1 experiences the market as though it were overwhelmingly dominated by Buyer Type 2's.

Good point, and that would easily hold a few hours worth of most salvage types.

Yup, and that's when they'll decide to delete it rather than post it.

No they won't. They'll decide it's not worth the hassle and just delete it.


Or... instead of deleting it you could pack it all over to the friendly neighborhood IO/SO vendor and sell it for the vendor price.

The irony is that most of the casual players are listing their salvage at that price or lower anyway just to get rid of it fast. So, your low ball bid could be equal to or less than the price you get to just carry it over to a store, and you'd still net most of it.

And that would explain why the market is so much easier to deal with in the wee hours of the morning. Too bad most of the people who play the game aren't on then to experience it.

Also there is nothing wrong with letting sales get by you when you're not on. The artificial scarcity doesn't take hours to build up.

You're making that sound harder than it is. Most sellers are not planning to camp there by WW all day waiting for a high price. They have about 15 slots, and their salvage is too diverse to put it all in those slots, but their team is about to leave on another radio mission and their storage is full. If they don't empty it out, they might risk missing the next Mu Vestment or Enchanted Impervium that would have dropped.

What do they do?

A standing bid of 500 inf will scoop up most salvage such as human blood samples and the like.

Except the prices aren't high in general. They're only high if you're willing to post it for a whole day.


Yes. You are right. It's the ratio of supply to demand that determines what should happen, but all of my arguments are still exactly as valid.

If there is high demand and mediocre supply, increasing supply is desirable. If there is mediocre demand and extremely low supply, increasing supply is also desirable. If there is mediocre demand and high supply, it's probably for the best if people are choosing to delete their salvage rather than sell it. If there is low demand and mediocre supply, then it is still for the best if they delete rather than sell.

However, what I'm describing is a situation where there is high demand and mediocre supply, but potential sellers are being scared away by low standing bids, motivating them to delete salvage that people actually want to buy.

Yeah. That's what I'm getting at. At level 20, I need 35 IO's to fill all my enhancement slots so that I won't have to bother with DO's and SO's anymore. That's considered the optimal time to do inventions, because you get decent bonuses, and you can still build them with beginner level salvage.


"nobody" was meant to imply few people. I think most readers would have been aware of that.

If the price is 50 inf in a proper market, that would indicate that demand is low, and there's little benefit to be had by increasing supply.

If the price is 50 in a blocked market, that could be either because demand is low, or because it is high and a lot of people have placed large standing orders. If demand is high, then the best result for everyone would be to see supply increase. But the likely result is that supply will drop instead. That's a bad thing, because it makes more people unhappy.



I don't like people to ruin the market. Not all market people do that, but some certainly do, and I don't like those few.

Also, I think you are wrong about the standing orders. Even with all servers running full speed, salvage only trickles in at a somewhat slow rate. Certainly a "human blood sample" listed at 5 inf *would* be the one that gets bought when a player bids 200,000, but that is only *if* it doesn't get snatched up by a standing offer of 50 inf first. Odds are the two players (the one putting a human blood sample up for 5 inf, and the one bidding 200,000 inf) aren't going to post their offers at exactly the same moment in time, so the 5 inf offer will almost always be bought by the standing bids rather than the short-lived high bids. The 200,000 inf bidder will also probably end up buying from one of the standing offers.

It's true that all you have to do is post your bid and leave long enough for someone to put another item on the market, but if this trend continues, then fewer and fewer people are going to be bothering themselves to sell their drops.

At that rate, I'd be making about 5 recipes a day assuming one play session per day. But at level 20 I have 30 enhancement slots to fill, 35 if you count the inherent fitness powers and rest.


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I'm bothered whenever I see market behavior that doesn't follow free market rules. I don't care which direction the price is deviating in. In an ideal market, if you're only getting 50 inf for your salvage, the reason is because nobody wants it. If you, accordingly, are motivated to delete it rather than sell it, then maximum number of people are going to be the happiest as a result of the decision.

On the other hand, if the reason you're only getting 50 inf for your salvage is because it's sufficiently valuable that other players are willing to give up precious inventory slots on their character's account in order to post low overnight bids, ...... and you decide to delete your salvage rather than sell it, then your decision is going to make a few people happy at the expense of the many. (Because the will of the many is for supply to increase.)

People who are really into playing the market really enjoy this stuff, but they are also a small minority of the playing population. If them having fun means everyone else doesn't have fun, then it would be very foolish of NCSoft to favor them.

In other words, spend a week doing my IO's at level 20. That [sarcasm] sounds like a lot of fun [/sarcasm]

I guess I'm just a moron. Here I thought I was playing a game that was designed to be fun, and it turns it was actually designed to be tedious. I'm bringing this up partly because I think the devs ought to take a look at it. Any practical solution they can devise that doesn't cost too much to implement will certainly help their bottom line. The market is kind of a core part of the game.


I should be clear that the problem is not me on the buying end. It's the seller who gets screwed. The seller just wants to get rid of the stuff so they can get more drops, but if the price is only going to be 5 inf per item, then he/she might as well just delete it and save him/her-self a trip. Usually salvage doesn't drop in stacks (sometimes it does, just not usually.) Nobody wants to tie up all 15 of their market slots selling "simple chemical" type salvages.

Right now, you have to kind of naive to put any of that stuff on the market, or you're going for a badge.

That would be an awesome story, and possibly answers the question as to why the Khelds are blocked "just cause".

Maybe the devs have a blockbuster storyline just waiting to be unleashed, and they don't want to ruin it. Or....maybe they haven't thought of one yet.

I'm still tempted to try taking it, then using it on some weak mobs and running a power analyzer on them just to be sure. It would so awesome if it worked.

I'm still 2 levels away. Anyone want to help talk me down from the ledge, ... before I jump?

At least they could stretch it, like what they did for electric armor by making Energize into a self heal.

However, at this point there is about a 62% change I will take it. Just to see if it can be made useful.

Ok, so I've been looking into my proc options. Apparently it only accepts sleep and end Mod sets.

So, suppose I put Energy Manipulator: 10% Chance to Disorient on it. Do you think that would proc once/second (like the end mod effect does), once per 10 seconds (like most recurring powers), or never?

If I were doing Ninjas/Poison I might also consider trying Fortunate Hypnosis: Chance to Placate, though it would only fire once when the sleep effect fires. It probably wouldn't benefit me very much on mercs, though, unless it lasts a long time.

/Traps is powerful,. but you get the least benefit with Mercs/Traps of pretty much any combination.

Thugz/Traps - you can softcap their defense.
Robots/Traps - Probably come close to soft capping def, and they blow up nicely.
Zombies/Traps - Same (if you count the -ToHit debuffs)
Ninjas/Traps - Also comes close to soft capping.

Demons/Traps - I don't know.....I'm gonna try that one as soon as I come up with a good name for the character.

However, Mercs have no inherent defense to stack the force field generator to. You'll get them up to about 20% defense and then that's it. (maybe 27%, if you do maneuvers, and Invis other on them....)