Nethergoat

Smurph offered to fund any effort to 'control' a piece of commonly traded salvage over a period of time. Nobody ever came up with a workable plan and the offer still stands.

the point being, it's easy to imagine shadowy forces controlling this or that aspect of the market, but in practice market behavior is determined by the simple, fundamental law of supply and demand.

compared to what?
I've found it much better than in any other MMO I've played.

There are a great many very useful invention set IOs available for relatively low prices. If you're talking 15-25 million you're talking about stuff just below the SUPER expensive stuff like the uniques. Nobody needs that kind of stuff to solo, unless you want to really jack up the difficulty and run +6-8 spawn size.


Nonsense.
Solo leveling has gotten much faster over the last few years, with changes like patrol XP, XP smoothing and the virtual elimination of debt as a meaningful drag on speed.

team leveling may be slower due to various farming nerfs over the years (the days of doorsitting wolf missions with and getting most of a level in one gulp are long gone), but you're complaining specifically about soloing, which has only gotten faster.

You have a weird perception of how fast soloists leveled back in the day, which I can't help you with. You don't need super expensive IO builds to solo fast, you don't need to run at high difficulty to solo fast.

If all you care about is pure speed, buy yourself a stealth IO (they can be had for ~5 million with a little patience) and 'ghost' every mission you can. Efficiently generating mission XP is a really fast way to level.

Barring that, set your difficulty at +0 or even -1, bump up the spawn size as high as you can take without being seriously challenged and just steamroll missions. Mulching huge fields of unassuming enemies will generate rewards (drops, xp) much faster than struggling through higher level, more challenging spawns.

Indeed.
I'd like someday for all the farmers to strike for a few weeks, demonstrating graphically what supply would look like without them. The anti-farming zealots would have a mouthful of chalk to eat.

that's a VERY pricey proposition.

There are ~150 NMIs posted for more than 3 million inf each.

I'm not sure I'd even bet that Mis' specimen is the most expensive on offer. =P

You seem to be saying saying that the blueprint for the building and the building itself are the same thing.
They quite obviously are not.
I'm no longer sure what point you're trying to make, but this particular train of thought is steaming right off a cliff.

People who know what they're talking about use terms precisely.
When you're dealing with people who know what they're talking about it pays to use terminology correctly.

If I dropped in on a PvP thread and started insisting on my own definitions for well established PvP terminology on the basis that people "in the chat channels" defined them this or that way I'd be rightfully mocked and derided.

you can always count on Fulmens to rain logic on everyones parade!

>:e

Unless you're doing the flipping you have no way of knowing.

I often put up multiple bids for this or that IO without bothering to vary my price. I have poor friends and buy stuff for them all the time.

You can suspect flipping but it is basically unknowable without firsthand information. Which I'm sure is why it's such a popular scapegoat with the paranoid and uninformed.

there are SO MANY recipes like that these days you could fish for weeks without catching someone else's niche.

Oh, look at my shiny new sig!

Flipping in the context of this forum has a very specific, well defined & universally accepted meaning.

Flipping and crafting are not even roughly comparable and the have a VASTLY DIFFERENT 'effect'- flipping recirculates raw material through the market, crafting destroys raw materials in the creation of IOs.

Not even close to the same thing.

Where do you come by this magical bit of data?

Flipping was my second market discovery, hot on the heels of figuring you could make a fortune (by the pre-market definition, anyway) vendoring recipes.

Point being, there have been flippers for as long as there's been a market.
The behavior of supply and demand is a better explanation for why good stuff costs more now than flipping.

Anyway, flippers do NOTHING to the high end of the price range. They have to price behind the curve to move stock and keep slots clear. I know its hard for many of you to hear, but PLAYERS decide what stuff is "worth", not flippers.

You can't flip junk nobody wants, and you can't make anyone pay more than they want to bid.

Indeed.
Sellers have no-one to blame but themselves for the price they choose to list at. The exception would be a typo listing like Fulmens putting up that PvP IO for a million and change instead of a billion and change. =P

Unrealistic expectations are made to be dashed on the harsh shoreline of reality.

Price is a useful gauge of how badly someone wants something.
If you don't really want it (i/e, you make an unrealistically low bid), why should you get it ahead of people who DO want it (i/e, who make realistic bids)?

So, not because as the IO system matured more people used it and figured out what "the good stuff" was, which increased demand and caused prices to rise?

Huh.

This statement is empty of meaning.
The reality is if you don't have the lowest price currently on offer, you don't sell anything.

Worth selling?
Well, lets say there's a store that buys Widget X for less than it costs to make
That's not a good deal, so very few people would sell them Widget X.

If that same store raised their offer so people could turn a profit selling them Widget X, more people would sell them Widget X and so the supply of Widget X at the store would increase.

To avoid confusion, 'Widget X' = SALVAGE and 'the store' = THE MARKET.

Availability helps you, higher selling prices for your junk helps you.
So, no.

I have no idea, but I love them for it. =D


The recipe I'm working right now is available for 2-3 million + some patience and sells quite briskly for ~20 million.

this is the key point.

A more realistic view of the situation than OMG PRESTIGE BUYING IS CHEETING would be OMG WHY ARE THEY GIMPING THEMSELVES BUYING PRESTIGE WHEN THEY COULD BE CARPET BOMBING THE SERVER WITH RECRUITMENT TELLS AND GRINDING TFS LIKE ALL THE OTHER BIG GROUPS


I mean, if generating prestige were our primary goal we'd be better served using our billions to bribe players to grind prestige for us. That would be a vastly more efficient use of inf than throwing it away at the current ridiculous conversion rate.

"Hey, if you join our SG with its super sweet base and core of friendly players we'll pay you 500,000,000 inf to say in SG mode all the time" sounds like a pretty good sales pitch to me. =P

I don't bother flipping those, but I do pick them up cheap and craft 'em for giant profits.

=D

For my part, I'm not trying to 'prove' anything.
To me inf doesn't have any meaning, so this project is great. It's making me pay attention again, and that's fun.

Now *your* game experience is going to be different than mine, you'll have different definitions of fun and that's great- diversity is the spice of life and all that.


???

Who're they? SGs?

My only complaint with RPers were their silly arguments against merged markets. That's not a problem any more, so we're cool. =P


It's fun.

Aaaaaaaaad.....so do we.

*shrug*

Take my word for it...they do.

=P

Well, it would...sometimes.
Other times you'd be paying 100k or whatever, or there just wouldn't *be* any.

And I've already explained how flippers increase supply. Brief recap, stuff that would otherwise be destroyed is recirculated, a higher price floor encourages listing junk rather than deleting it.

Not complicated.

You are utterly wrong.

With salvage specifically, they demonstrably increase supply in two ways- first, recirculating salvage that would otherwise be destroyed via crafting or vendoring.

Second, by raising the price floor and making it worthwhile for players to sell instead of delete.


They *generate* the supply, which isn't quite the same thing.

Well, except flippers don't craft anything.

But hey, way to bring your brand of penetrating insight and deep knowledge to the thread!

from a gameplay standpoint a 'disenchanting' mechanism would create a market for all that absolute garbage people *have* to make to get badges. It's like vendor mules who nibble off the garbage salvage at the bottom of the food chain.

So you beat Smurphy's Challenge?

Impressive!
What was your strategy?


Or wait, are you just talking out of your hat?
=(

this has happened to me a few times over the years, and cancelling and re-bidding has worked.