Enyalios

Wow, not listening to advice in two of my three favorite forums. Are you stalking me B_C?

IO Build is to complement the powers the toon has.....not gimp the best of them into un-usability and force oddball attack chains. I think you're best off trying one of these builds which mixes some HOs in for siphon life. I mean if you're still looking for price complaints for the market forum feel free to put level 53 HOs in the slots so you can complain how marketeers make items which don't pop anymore so expensive.

Human beings by nature look for people to "Other" and exclude from their groups. Membership in the us (non-othered) group provides some sort of satisfaction to them. Its just how people are structured.

Be honest.....you're walking down a cruddy street in New York City (lets assume you're white and middle or upper-middle class) on the way back to your car. Your brain will cause you in this mildly dangerous situation to react to otherness as bad to the degree of otheriness someone else has.

For example, under these circumstances if a spanish speaking, dark-skinned person and a silent dark-skinned person walk past -- most people will perceive the spanish speaking person as more of a threat by moving out of their way, avoiding, etc. If a scuzzy-looking white person and a silent dark-skinned person walk past most people will perceive the dark-skinned person as more of a threat. Its pretty much degrees of otherness barring something outstanding like the white guy acting crazy or doing something offensive (mostly this is a judgement call othering the person anyhows).

I've even caught myself doing it, even to the point once where I crossed the street (dangerous in NYC than the risk of not crossing all things considered) in order to avoid passing someone who had done nothing wrong but was coded as othered in my mind by his garb and general look.

So why do some players seek to declare that marketeers are reducing their fun? Honestly its because they don't marketeer and we're a convenient if not disadvantaged minority of players which are easy to scapegoat for their own inability to have everything they want all the time. Of course marketeers (myself included) often do the same back by calling purchasers of their items the BUY IT NAO! crowd rather than simply people who value their time a bit more than their inf.

Welcome to being an imperfect being who is pulled as much by hormones and instinct as reason. We call ourselves humanity (which is derived from latin roots which meant the same as me).

I did like 2500 in random commons 2-3 weeks ago.....I hardly dented the common salvage problem at all. I did make a decent amount of inf though.

I got burned pretty well with some oblit damage procs -- they were going for 60M and dropped to 20-25 range. I had a few listed at like 35M+101 but I pulled them.

I keep about 6 "producing" toons at all times...these are buying recipes and crafting them. If there is room they also sell a couple. In general they have about 1.5B each on them liquid at the begining of being a producer and then I drop them back out to selling when they reach 500M.

Generally the recipes created by these producers will fill the market slots of about 12 more toons which generally average holding about 1B or so. I have a 2B storage toon on every server from the old days when I did inf exchanges for people cross server for a fee (pre-gleemail). I also have about 100M on every toon above 10th level on every server....as I have severe altitis thats alot of 100Ms.

When any toon which is actively working in any way cracks 1.85B I gleemail 1B off them and toss it in either my own inf burning pit or the '88s pit....or occasionally buy something nice.

I try not to store multiple billions on the market deliberately with one exception. I keep a bid out on my main for 3 PvP IOs which exceed 2B most of the time at 2B each. When one fills I either slot it or sell it off-market. They don't fill very often so its basically storage.

Pokes the dead horse and hopes it doesn't get up.

If it made those who need the lesson go away I'd pay 3B for a level 10 intangiable. In the time I spent trying to reason with him this past week rather than marketeering I've forgone like 750M in earnings...though the prices on my idle niches have all risen so perhaps I'll do better in the long-run.

It was quite possible to make inf even in the recent downturn in prices. Now that prices on Pool C's have dropped so much of course alot are saving up for PvP IOs and the pool C's have begun to rise again. Perhaps we'll reach equilibrium at some point....or with the upcoming mass respecs with i19 probably no time soon.

Ah curse me for my real market proclivities. I assumed you meant prices were down not the market server crashed.

Recent visitors to our board have implicitly posed a moral question about what we do as marketeers. Effectively the question comes down to the following: Is it evil to be ebil?

I propose to examine different ways to make inf off the market and determine if it is possible for an outside observer using Millsian principles to determine that what we are doing is in some way immoral or destructive to the game as a whole.

Forms of marketeering:

I. Flipping -- the most basic of all forms of marketeering. Flipping has a tendency to lower the high end of an items range while raising the low end of its range. The goal is to bid higher than the bottom an item hits and ask low enough to sell in enough volume to make it worth doing. The more people flip an item, the lower the spread between the high and low ends will be with less volatility. Lower volatility is a common good and therefore this activity passes the test for not being "evil" persay. Flipping does have some side forms though....

a) Flipping and destroying -- this is where a flipper buys a bunch of something then relists it much higher then buys intervening stock and destroys it (sells to vendor or deletes). Because this reduces supply I'd say this is not working towards the common good. That said, the current rules allow it despite it being a win-lose play.

b) Destroying to no good end -- this is where someone with large sums of inf buys and destroys (vendor?) a large portion of the outstanding stock of an item. Usually done with common salvage but also seen with cheaper recipes. This causes a temporary rise in the price of these items. Since there is no objective to profit from it its less malicious than flip and destroy but I imagine it probably reduces the overall utility of the gaming community as a whole. Perhaps when done to common salvage it encourages players to play content not AE which would be a plus though.

II. Buy recipe, craft, sell -- this is where a marketeer purchases recipes and crafts them to pocket the spread between the build cost (recipe + salvage + crafting cost) and the finished product cost (sale price of the IO). This tends to raise the price of recipes and lower the price of finished IOs. It also saves purchasers the trouble of doing the crafting themselves and when done in larger stacks (5's, 10's) it creates economies of scale which allow more competed IOs to be made in less total player hours spent. Because it increases the rate at which IOs are created and tends to lower the price of crafted IOs this works towards the common good. Once again there are some variants on this strategy.

a) Cornering a recipe/IO -- this is where a marketeer attempts to gain all or nearly all of the supply of an IO and its recipes specifically to be able to increase the price on it. This strategy is very hard to pull off on 2 kinds of items: the very rare ones and the very common. Ultra Rare items are hard to corner because first and foremost they're mainly traded off-market now and I don't think anyone wants to be the off-market PvP IO broker. It'd be alot of work and if you're working that hard selling stuff get real-life commisions for it at least, right? Ultra common items are hard to corner because you have to live on the game to keep up with the volume of items you'd need to be acquiring. Often supply here greatly outstrips demand as well. Sometimes even when you do "corner" the market on an item like for example red fortune:endurance IOs.....its not really all that profitable because people have alternate defense sets they could slot which might be better for them. Some items can be "cornered" to the degree that one player might have 65% market share on sales in the finished IO. The only way to maintain that is to provide the IO at a fair price however. There are no sustainable competitive advantages in production of set IOs so if the spread gets too wide you'll attract competitors.

b) Flip the recipe & craft and sell the IO -- this is where a marketeer doubles up on recipe acquisition of a specific recipe with the intention of selling the recipes and the finished IOs at the same time, while also attempting to hold a competitive advantage on new entrants to that niche by having (at least at first) a lower cost of crafting. This strategy leads to predictable profits for the marketeer once put in place and because the marketeer has to keep the spread reasonable to prevent new entrants into his/her niche also usually leads to lower prices on finished IOs. In some cases such as limited availability IOs (level restricted like Kin Combats/Miracles/etc) marketeers can abuse their "owned" niche. Otherwise this generally works towards the common good. Players who are looking to slot an IO if they don't like the crafted price can use patience and still slide a bid through the flipping spread and craft below the marketeers price and those who value their time more than the inf spread can pay the premium.

Will add more later on perhaps. Feel free to add strategies you know of as well and analyze them if you wish.

E.E.

I am a pretty hefty altoholic myself. I have a level 50 in every AT except scrapper (yes even each of WS/PB/NW/Fort/Crab/Bane). Honestly I've never finished a scrapper cause I keep falling asleep cause its too easy. I've levelled a toon to 50 on every server except Victory....although I have none on Protector at the moment because I moved the 50 I levelled up there.

Last reply to BC from me most likely:

What you don't get is that ultra-rares are intended to keep high-time-intensive players playing over multiple years. He seems to think they're there cause they're needed or that everyone should have them. In many ways they serve the same role that luxury goods like yachts and lambourghinis serve in the real world. They're a little nicer....but in reality they're more about status than performance.

You seem to think marketeering and farming are done in exclusion to playing the game but in reality they're more side things to do when nobody else is logged in to do TF or whatever.