Enyalios

By positions I mean my bid-asks and such. If people knew for example (real data from an old spreadsheet circa i14):

That I put out 5x10 bids for Titanium Coating Res/End @100034-100038

5 x 10 on all the salvage used at 1038 for all

And listed at all times 5 @ at 3000001, 5 @ 3100001, 5 @ 3333331, 10 @ 3500001, 10 @ 4000001, 5 @ 4500001, 5 @ 5000001, 5 @ 5500001 and a high-ball stack of 10 listed on Justice for 10000001.

Also I kept 30 support bids out on these at 500038 to prevent a collapse below crafting costs.

If they knew all that, they'd be able to use that significantly to their advantage. Thats what I mean by positions. And no people don't know what my positions are...even if they do know the likely niches.

I'm not worried about the 95% who don't read. If I gave my specific positions away the 5% could rip me down from making 600-1000M a day to a mere 100M a day. So I don't do it. As for generalities, if you "own" a niche you can make alot of inf off of it. I have one which gives 300M a day predictably every day...unless someone typoes and gives me more.

Is converting worth it? Probably not to most players. I convert, mostly cause I've run out of other realistic long-term goals other than burning 225B more to get my solo-VG to #1. My badger is 95% done (900ish badges), I have a level 50 in every AT, I have an excess of high quality IOs in my base.........so I made an odd goal for myself to have something useful to do while I still enjoy the game. A side benefit of converting is I am marginally reducing the supply of inf in the game which over time keeps down the rate of inflation inherent in a game w/o sufficient inf sinks.

I will conceed that you must have been making inf for a while if you have "blown up" roughly 20-30B to make that much prestige. So you probably know what you're doing marketeering. I don't "brag" either on these forums and rarely tell people what I'm doing. When I post its just to inform people about what works and what doesn't work or to add economic discussion to the mix (which may not be relevant since this isn't a real economy). You seem to have an excessively negative view of marketeers but if you hadn't noticed we really aren't doing this to "get rich" or ruin the market, or whatever....we already are rich and ruining the market makes no sense. We do it for as dissimilar reasons as why people play the PvE and PvP sides of the game. So try not to come here and troll everyone at once. I respect you as a very knowledgable badging guru; There is no reason to drag your rep down by slandering us because we write about making inf in the market.

I believe Fulmens started the whole blow inf up through prestige thing as a way to kill excess inf with his base matching project. Though, I think I inspired him to make a group on Guardian going after high spots because I was one of his best matching customers with my group on Freedom (Pandaemonium). So after all that he decided to see if other people would help on Virtue and Crazy 88's of Virtue was born. Let me tell you its alot faster with lots of people. Though I'm about to blow up some serious inf this week on Freedom. Only 235B to #1 on Freedom!

You can give me names all you like....but unlike the real market where a trade is signed with a medallion # and where even bids and asks are marked by market maker, there is no certainty here. Last 5 is a pathetic amount of information to be limited to.....and I wasn't referring to market PvP in general I was discussing any specific conflict. I welcome you to make the move from badging to market PvP if you like Beef Cake. At badging I respect your knowledge, organization, and general aptitude. But here you're out of your element and not as experienced as many of the other players. This isn't simply "reading some guides and messing up the market" as you've seemed to put it earlier. Marketing which is pure price control will always eventually fall apart. The big money is in providing a service by crafting certain IOs and controlling a significant portion of that IO's production as a niche. If you move into my niches I'll be happy to take some of your inf or use you to make us both inf but myself the larger share...depending on how you play your salvage, recipes, and IOs. If you don't.....why would I PvP you?....no profit.

I dont really want to see what anyone has hoarded....cause then people would want to see mine and I don't feel like posting pics of my 54 tables full of 50-100 IOs each (2 bases on freedom, 1 on infinity, 1 on justice). They may not all be purples, but I still have alot of those.

If you want to impress me with your ability to accumulate inf or stuff (which can be made into inf)....post a pic of one of your toons with more than 80M prestige earned (or converted). Then you can show me you had more than 40B that you just burned cause it was getting too tough to store it all.......kind of like me.

The nature of Market PvP is that you'll rarely know the name of your opponents...and when someone does proclaim something (driving up price of X) you have every reason to suspect they're actually doing the opposite.

This is part of it. A large portion of the pbase is getting toons from Praetoria to 50 now. Not everyone levels their toons fast you know.

Random is random. Just when you're farming at x8 you kill enough guys to get one randomly. I do it on +1x8 rather than 0x8 because I get pool A drops and the occasional pool C drop all at level 50 that way.....I hate getting a good pool C from a boss and its level 49.

We're not talking about purples as a whole....we're talking about speculating on purples (not popping more unless the price paid for some causes someone to have better IOs and thus pop more). I pop purples, I also sometimes speculate on purples. Popping purples to sell is a win-win game......someone else gets to buy a purple at a price that is less than the presumed utility of the purple (or they wouldn't have bid it in the 1st place).....I get inf and since I don't need the purple gain utility as well. When I speculate on purples its a -0.1 sum game since the house keeps 10% and there is a fixed quantity at that given time on market. I only win if I get someone to pay at more than 10% more than I paid......ergo very similar to a zero-sum game.


Now there is I guess a potential arguement that high purple prices encourage more people to run farms popping them.....but I don't believe most players are rational inf generating agents in this game or someone other than me would have been popping purples aggressively redside circa i13 when I went from wealthy (a couple billion) to stupidly wealthy (100's of billions of value stored) mostly by popping and selling purples redside. There was another surge when the MM pets in AE didn't exemp down as well and once again.....nobody but me popping purples aggressively redside as prices rose to absurd levels (armageddons selling for 1.0B for example for week or so).

I'm not absolutely sure economics can be applied to the market though since as I have agreed, many of not most participants are not rationally driven players seeking to maximize their inf as a proxy for their utility.

In game theory and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Zero-sum can be thought of more generally as constant sum where the benefits and losses to all players sum to the same value of money (or utility). Cutting a cake is zero- or constant-sum, because taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others. In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties' aggregate gains and losses is either less than or more than zero. Zero-sum games are also called strictly competitive.


Not too bad a definition of zero-sum game pulled from wiki. O.K. Its technically not zero-sum because the house keeps 10%. But yes I mean that there is no increase in marketwide productivity of popping recipes associated with buying recipes from one seller or another (based on their efficiency at converting assets to profits through something resembling ROA or ROE). So effectively the market functions as a zero-sum game with the only real difference in utility for participants being the difference between exchange value and use value. When you're playing with purples, the way you get more (win) is for another player to pay more (lose) than he would have if you hadn't paticipated. Its possible that this will still increase the total utility of the pops to the player base as the purples will be more thoroughly sent to those who have large sums of inf and its possible those players play more thus deriving more total use value.

Now that I've put you all to sleep with economics...........well I'll get back to watching baseball.

My 3 are probably for self-slotting and 2 of my 3 will be level 50s. If someone offered enough I might part with the 3rd but I'd rather not cause then I'll have to wait till like i20 to have another probably.

But this is like Russia where the President is the lesser position until Putin wants it back and then he'll re-arrange the constitution again, right?


Seriously though avoid market PvP against experienced opponents until you have some inf you're willing to lose. I'm very good at doing what I call "sucker profiting" someone and then dumping the niche on them while still leaving lowball support bids up. When they get sick of making sub-par profits they usually dump crap they expected to sell at 20M per IO at whatever high bid is....and then I'm there to buy their stock and relist it to make the 20M. If you know how much volume is above your listing prices you know when someone is undercutting you and can strike with precision to drive them off (or you can make them think they're going to make inf and take some of theirs....up to you).