Misaligned

Bottom line on the "cornering"

In order to actually "corner" a niche, you will have to place protective bids at around 90% of your sell price to maintain control. It is possible in some circumstances to post protective bids at 100% of your sell price, but those are generally extremely high volume items that you realistically have no hope of "cornering". By placing your cornering bids at 100% (or more) of your sale price, you ensure that you leave no gap for any competition. You are however losing money on every transaction and you rely totally on "luck" that the people buying your stuff will overbid enough for you to make a profit.

So now you're selling at 100%, bidding at 90% and you are good to go! However, this does not mean you have "cornered" the market by any means. This 10% gap you have on the 90/100 is an area that anyone can exploit on you. You list for 100, they list for 99 and theirs sells first. You buy at 90, they buy at 91. Sure, in the end they're losing a bit of money on the deal, but if your intention is to "corner" that niche, then you need to move your prices to 92 and 98. You have effectively lowered the "for sale" and raised the low end.

This is what people are talking about when they say flipping stabilizes prices. This is factual information people, and all of the hand waving you do cannot change it. Destroying salvage is not flipping. It is not cornering. It is simply destroying salvage. It is not even price manipulation. You cause the price to rise, but you have no actual control over it beyond that. Manipulation infers (at least to me) a measure of control.

If you want to talk about actual manipulation of prices, you're talking about a venture that will essentially net you a very small profit, or a net loss, unless you are riding someone else's wake while doing it. If someone else lays out all of the capital to buy up all of the supply of an item then yes, you can potentially come in behind and artificially keep that price high for a while. Not forever, and definitely not a week, but for a while. In that instance you can make a profit. If you intend to drive prices up through a shortage, be prepared to lay out a lot of capital for something that will most likely blow up in your face 2-3 days in.

However, the main points of these discussions as I see them fall along the following assumptions:

"Pro-Flipper" will say this:

Flippers stabilize prices and do not drive them up. The act of flipping in a competitive market ensures that any attempts you make at raising the price, even over a period of time, will not yield the results you hope for.

"Anti-Flippers" will say this:

Flippers come into a niche, drive up the price, and make a huge profit by creating shortages and by controlling all of the supply.

In a game where everything drops everything, you cannot possibly believe that anyone can control a majority share of anything meaningful that will net profits in a magnitude that others have shown through straight crafting. Salvage, common salvage in particular, moves volumes apparently beyond the comprehension of most of the people who play this game.

In the course of 7 days, I sold over 3,000 spirit thorns. I felt that I was able to sell at least half of all of the spirit thorns that sold that week. I would not venture to say that I sold more than 60% total. This means that even spirit thorns, which are a relatively low demand common salvage move around 800 or more a day. I cannot prove that I sold at least 50%, but I feel confident in that conclusion. The only people who could ever actually verify that are NCSoft, and they don't seem inclined to give that info out According to some people, I didn't even control 50%. But for the sake of the following, we will assume I did control 50%.

This means that 800 or more spirit thorns are sold every day, on average.

Let that sink in. Now contemplate how you will "control" the vast majority, 90%, of those to maintain your cornered market?

Now contemplate it on an item that is actually in demand and moves in the neighborhood of 1500-3,000 a day. These tend to be the items that are cited on these boards and in this thread. These salvage are high demand - they have hundreds if not thousands of outstanding bids waiting to fill. You can bet that at least some portion of those bids are a flipper.

What actions will you take to ensure that you will control the vast majority, again - 90%, to maintain your cornered market?

Remember, just because 1,500 move through the market every day does not mean it is a steady supply. More than half (estimated by some) would sell between the hours of 5-10pm EST. That's 50% of the volume in 20% of the time.

Even if we low ball it at 1,500 - in order to "corner" that niche, you're going to have to sell 1,350 of those. You will also need to buy, 1,350 of those. Using 2 separate characters, moving the purchased salvage through base storage (30 at a time per rack.. yay!) you will need to fill 135 orders of 10. Assuming you have 20 slots available on the market on both characters and you do nothing else (marketing) with them, you need to turn over every single slot on both of those characters about 7 times a day.

Again, knowing that anyone else can swoop in and steal your niche with no problem (you've actually done all of the work for them in this case) you must bid extremely high (90% of sell) and pray that you make your better end of profits in what people offer you.

Example:

You pick common salvage X. This salvage does 1,500 a day. You are listing them for 100k and buying everything under 90k.

This leaves you 500 profit after market fees. 500 profit on a 100k transaction! Nice! That's 1/2 of a %! Go you!

Assuming you actually tend to average 125k per sale (a 25% over bid), you will net about 27k per sale when all is said and done. Multiply this across your sales a day (90% of 1,500 is 1,350), and you're raking in 36,450,000 a day. Not too shabby!

Or, conversely, what if you have stiff competition? What if you need to lay down covering bids at 100% instead of 90%? Your profit per item drops to about 17.5k. You're now down to 23,625,000

Now figure out how many hours you will need to spend glued to that market constantly adjusting bids, adjusting sales, moving salvage from one character to a base, to the other character.

And figure out your inf/hour.

And figure out how many days you are willing to devote to your new-found money maker? 2? 10? Every day?

I would estimate that once you get very, very good at this you could probably get away with only spending about 4 hours total per day on this venture. You would need to check your bids regularly, and your sales to ensure that you always have at least 1 of each - figure 12 times a day at least. At 90/100 (or 36,450,000 a day) you are now making about 9 mil inf / hour!

Not a very "good" amount considering all of the work you put into it. Personally, even with being out of the game for all but an hour a day over the past 3 weeks, I've still managed to accumulate over 2 billion. And that's with an entire week of no marketeering and using one of my marketeers to simply clean out a base full of junk that no one wants (off level IOs... yay?!). I don't sit in front of the market the whole time I'm on - I spend maybe 10 minutes there a day per character. 3 marketeers and I'm up to roughly 30 minutes a day. 30 minutes a day... times 21 days... and I'm into the game for 11.5 hours of marketeering (average). This means that for my effort I'm making 174 mil per / hour (or roughly 5x an hour what the "cornering" person is making.

This is why the "Pro-Flippers" are so adamant about their positions. This is why when people come to the forums and provide anecdotal evidence that they ask for proof. This is why when ever someone says that they "cornered" common salvage for a week, or a month, or 2 years, we all call bull. Its possible - its not likely, but its possible. The amount of work you would need to put in to make it functional makes the entire process unrealistic at best.

And since no one seemed to notice, TopDoc didn't corner a niche. He bought out most of the stock. He then left low end bids up to keep the "cheap stuff" off the market. Either he stored them or he deleted them. Odds are, he had to delete at least some of them.

Once he had enough bids in place long enough, people who wanted to "buy it now" needed to dip into the "waaaaaaay overpriced" filler that sits at the top end of all of the salvage.

Once he was confident that people were willing to pay the top end prices, he began introducing his at just under a million. They began to sell. He sold about 500.

No mention about what it cost him to keep those covering bids up - how long they were up - if he continued them. In fact, at no point does he actually show where he "cornered" a niche. He claims he did, but he did not. Yet we are to use this as proof that cornering is possible and profitable and what every flipper does?

For whoever is messing with Impervium and drove the price down to 1.2 mil...



Thanks!


And yes, I do realize that its due to ToTing and not manipulation.

Saved me a bunch on one of my niches! Makes paying the omfg price of 100k for the other 3 salvage... wait.. I always paid 100k for the other 3. Nevermind. That's just 800k more profit for me!

Yay me!

My vote:

We keep the crazy 88s

We put effort into the other SG that's currently doing this (I forget the name, sorry )

When both are #1, we maintain. Maintaining should be challenge enough all on its own. I know the people in #1 spots tend to really dislike it when someone takes their spot, so they will push. They push, we push back, in the end, only the inf gets hurt

Sorry I have not been on lately, nor have I contributed much. I am having some medical issues that are keeping me out of game for most of the time.

I feel violated.



Congrats anyways!

2 responses...

And still no proof.

But some creative name calling and some wounded egos seem to abound.

Interesting.

I think I shall label this... "Experiment Dur".

I dunno - I'll go all the way back to the first page for this:

If I am player A and I have a budget of 800 million for my build.

It used to be that I would spend ~400 million on Pool A, B, and C's which left me 400 million for a purple.

I would bid my 400 and that would be the cap. However, due to the price drop, you'd see that those same Pool A, B, and C's now cost about 1/2 of what they used to - 200 mil. This now allows me to spend 600 million on the same purple I wanted prior to the merge.

On the other hand...

Who slots 1 purple?

Figuring it from a budget explanation, we'll assume that player a wants to slot just 5 of one purple set instead of just one purple. Old prices would put the build around:

5 x 300 mil avg = 1.5 bil

plus

350 mil for the rest for a total of about 1.8 bil.

With current prices seeming to sit around 500 mil, 5 purples alone will cost you 2.5 billion.

I don't see anyone having that much "extra" money due to prices coming down on Pool C's. Even an expensive 900 mil Pool C build (no purples) only gains 450 mil and that doesn't even cover the cost of a single additional purple - let alone 4 more.

I think in reality the thing that is driving this more than anything is not merits, or TFs, or farming, or anyone having money. I do believe it is in anticipation of the incarnate system.

It is expressly level 50 content.

People have heard that its going to be "hard"

Purples in this case seem to be the "bigger hammer" that most people use to deal with content that is harder than normal.

I believe we have a greater number of people gathering their money together to try and "pimp out" their favorite 50. Even if 10 people a week buy a purple that they normally wouldn't purchase in anticipation of incarnate, that's 10 more people than normal. Hence, why the price goes up and continues to go up.

I am willing to bet, a small bet, but a bet none-the-less, that about 2 months after I19 comes out, purples will start a steady decline in price until they are around the 200-300 million mark once more. However, I expect to see yet another spike on the prices just before and right after the release of I19.

Alkirin... you're really trying my ability to make this any easier for you... so I will make a form for you to fill out

Question #1:

Please quote directly from the very first post any conclusions and assumptions you can find.


Question #2:

Explain how the following is logical:

Person A collects data for a week then presents data, but is "wrong"

Person B cites 2 incidents that occurred over a period of less than an hour each, and use those incidents as proof that Person A's non-existent conclusions are wrong.


Use all of the flowery language that you want. You may think it makes you look more intelligent, but in the end, it all still amounts to the same thing: You're saying "Ur rong!" and using exactly nothing to back it up.


Oh, and about your objection to my data collection methods and the use of Scientific Method.. clearly you missed this in grade school, and in the previous thread where I posted it... so I'll post it again... just for you:

Gonna toss this out there just one more time because Alkirin and the ilk are not getting it:

I have been so very entertained by this thread over the past few days! Thanks all! I really needed that!


And since there are some who are bent on the fact that I somehow make an assertion or come to any conclusion in my first post, I will say the following:

You're all little old women with no legs and purple mohawks.

I used unbelievably tight standards when determining this, and can state that the above is 100% fact.

Would any of you care to lay out some empirical evidence that proves me wrong?