Grouchybeast

The problem is that human memory is enormously and notoriously flawed when it comes to remembering and analysing something like drop rates. If there is a problem, then the only way you'd be able to convince anyone in a position to do something about it (i.e., the devs) would be to collect enough actual hard evidence to demonstrate it. There are the tools available to do it, but very few people can be bothered to make the effort.

It really does.

Now I'm imagining some elaborate accountancy system whereby the Port Oakes and Atlas Park registrars settle up their debts at the end of every month, exchanging appropriate amounts of the social standing that they collected in order to keep the lights on and the teleporters running.

Now we can bid on stacks of IOs, though, it's pretty easy to place a bunch of low-ball bids in WW for crafted 30 or 35 IOs in advance. With badgers dropping crafted IOs on the market at regular intervals, the stacks usually fill quickly enough.

The player was Laevateinn. The thread about the fund, including all the weekly growth reports, is here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=184314

Gleemail will definitely make it a lot easier to do something like that from now on.

That's because the Goat bought it and deleted it.

Why does anyone buy instant mashed potatoes, when the real thing is cheaper and tastier and perfectly easy to make? Because people are willing to pay for the convenience.

That said, I've never anyone in a supermarket cursing the maufacturers because of the mark-up on Smash over wholesale raw potatoes. Maybe some people would find the CoX market less distressing if recipes and salvage sold in a different building to crafted IOs.

I do this all the time. All you have to be willing to do is look for recipes at less than max level, where flippers don't operate because the turnover is too low. There are still plenty of ridculous bargains to be found.

You should have an official SG tag for all WW bids made by SG characters. Maybe 666. :-)

As well as the chance of their being more than one person badging at a time, Master-Craftsman and Fabricator need 1000 and 2000 IOs crafted. (Before I16, Fabricator was 10,000.) That's more than you'll make getting all the other crafting badges. The easiest way to get the badges is by crafting empowerments buffs in a base, and at three ingredients per buff that chews through a fair amount of salvage in a short space of time.

O.o

My theory is, the magical sparkly salvage fairies who list all the salvage that appears in WW are slacking off.

Or maybe other people can't be bothered to list them either, which drives down supply, which drive up prices until more people think they're worth listing again.

Nah. It must be the fairies.

I delete almost all mez IOs when I'm badging. No bugger wants them, anyway. That's like deleting the recipes and the salvage that went into them.



Ooh, I think I felt a little tingle of ebil.

To, um, get back to the original question, that seems like pretty normal market fluctution for Alchemical Silver prices, when there's likely to be a reduced number of players in the mid levels. Even the number of bids seems okay for a combined market + people putting in patient bids for salvage for later + flippers taking advantage.


Although you're making me nostalgic for the uncommon salvage market at the heights of AE madness. That was the most fun I've ever had in the market.

Again, you have to remember that was a very specific goal of 'as much as possible, as fast as possible', in pursuit of which he was trying to use as many niches as possible, hence the large number of different IOs. IIRC, he was aiming to have only one of any kind of IO listed at any one time. That isn't a time-efficient way to marketeer normally.

And actually, the IO list was created in advance of the experiment, so he wasn't really crafting on demand. It's just that he was working on a much large selection of niches than would normally be the case.

I'll ask him to drop into the thread and describe his more typical approach, and how much time it takes up. :-)

I wasn't suggesting you should try to do what he did, just that you might find the numbers interesting in terms of profit and turnover. Archie was specifically trying to get from zero to the inf cap in as fast a time as possible, the hardest part of that which, really, is the 'from zero'. Working a few different level 50 niches on an on-going basis isn't nothing like as time consuming.

Look at it this way -- you aim to make 500 million a month. At the rate he was making inf, Archie could've made, at a minimum, 12 billion a month, although in reality it would be more than that, as the rest of the month would lack the initial ramp-up phase. You'll only need to put in a fraction of the effort he did to make that 500 million tick over.

(I also thought the list would be helpful because you said you were having trouble finding the right things to craft. Despite the market merge, I assume most of those IOs are still good for a profit, and if not, then they're good sets to check out to see if any other pieces are selling well.)

The real answer to your initial question is -- you can't do exactly what you were doing in WoW, but instead it's pretty trivially easy to make the kind of money you're aiming for by working a few niches at level 50 and trading in whatever is selling nicely that week. Make yourself a personal base (which takes very little time to put together once you have a high level character to earn prestige) for storage and crafting, get a trading character who's maxed out on storage and market slots, and inf will roll in for little effort.

If you want to try out different ways to make inf, that's awesome and cool, and the forum will watch with interest. But you did ask a question, to which there's a fairly well-tested answer.