Nethergoat

Absolutely.
I always placed a few protective lowball bids to soak up incoming supply when I was crafting set IOs for sale.

This dovetails nicely with my own experiment flipping Ancient Bones.

So what?
The markets isn't in place to make everybody happy, it's there to facilitate the transfer of goods and provide an engaging mini-game for those players who enjoy such things.

With the exception of PO's it does a grand job at both those things.

The non-posting masses are just as likely to enjoy the market as not.
Or are you another one of those psychics who JUST KNOWS what the 'casual gamer' wants and feels?

You engage in it yourself, so that's good. At least we can't add 'hypocrite' to your lengthy rap sheet.

If every farmer in the game evaporated overnight, they would be replaced in the morning by a new group eager for the profits to be had from efficient drop production.

The structure of the system guarantees that SOMEbody will fulfill the role of supplier- whether it's you, or me, or some other random player is irrelevant.

We don't, so your paranoid extrapolation is meaningless.
The system provides enough incentive to guarantee that some % of the playerbase will spend their time feeding demand.

Your dismay over a system that does precisely the job it was designed for and which already has several 'failsafe' sources of alternative supply would be comical were it not so pathetic.

The thought that someone is MAKING anybody pay for the sort of outrageous luxury goods we're discussing here is purely ridiculous.

If you want a Ferrarri, it's going to cost you. If you want a certain limited edition Ferrari that comes up for sale very infrequently, and that a lot of other people also want, that's going to cost you a lot more and may take a long time.

Your consistently inane ranting about the very nature of the market has me picturing a dirty college radical from the 70's wearing a Mao cap and a Che tee shirt.

The Revolution failed, dude.
Get with the times.

nobody who knows what they're doing messes with common salvage except as a leaning tool- even at its least available and most expensive it's not worth wasting a slot on.

The shortage of common salvage is mainly the fault of MA. Players generating tickets aren't wasting them on commons for the same reasons marketeers aren't clogging their slots with commons.

Happily, tickets giveth as readily as they taketh away.
Don't want to get "gouged" on common salvage? Keep a small stack of tickets in your pocket for a rainy day. If you balk at paying 20k or whatever for some low supply common, roll your own at the MA desk. As a bonus, the extra salvage you generate will probably sell for a tidy profit

I don't get to actually play any of my characters a whole lot these days- for me IO'ing them out has to some extent become the game. Popping in and checking the market, picking up and crafting wins, collecting on sales, messing around with builds, all that fits nicely into my current (greatly reduced) gaming schedule.

Running the occasional mission to stress test performance on evolving builds is about the extent of my 'real' gameplay these days.

I have noticed lately that all the changes of the last few years have greatly suppressed my formerly insatiable appetite for new alts- the ability to evolve existing characters via IOs means I can keep scratching that character development itch with characters who've hit the level cap.

I'm sure Going Rogue will reignite my alt-itis though, if we get the plethora of new costume options I'm expecting.

there's this thing called "merits" you might want to check out.

you aren't even trying to make sense any more, are you?

When careful, polite explanation of process fails, verbal abuse is a balm for the Marketeer's chapped soul.

=)

ah ok, I misread.
I took your post to mean that the mini-game aspect of the market for scorekeeper type gamers was some sort of unintended, undesired consequence for the devs.

CO neatly demonstrates the pointlessness of an 'open' power system for a multiplayer video game.

I guess it could work if our theoretical game company had an infinite budget and an infinite # of employee hours to throw at it, but in the real world it isn't an efficient choice for a multiplayer game to make.

The AT system is a solid mix of novelty and balance. I'd rather they invested time making more ATs than some half-baked attempt to emulate CO's failed power model.

BECAUSE IT'S NOT FREE!

no way would a 'casual gamer' want a fair price for their junk, they would be giving it away for free!

=P

oh snap!

=p

So, let me get this straight.

A player wanders in here complaining about how poor they are and how unfair it is. We (collectively) describe various simple, foolproof methods of building wealth. Said player ignores our advice in favor of their original plan of whining about how poor they are and how unfair it is. We call them "lazy".

And this makes us "hypocrits"(sic)?

Somebody needs to buy you a working dictionary.

the same as any other middleman, smoothing the supply curve and assuring the availability of goods at market rates.

The market is intended "primarily" as a time sink, like every other activity in the game. Designing it to serve both the 'casual' gamer and the 'power' gamer is smart business when you're looking for ways to engage your playerbase.

If they wanted a store, they would have made a store.

it should be pinned.

Not necessarily.

Assuming it was an item with actual demand you'd get the 'boom/bust' cycle I observed during my experiment with Ancient Bones. There were times when an abundance of Ancient Bones were selling for 10 inf, there were times when there were very few available and they were going for a few hundred K each.

Enter the flipper.
In the beginning I raised the price floor from roughly 10 inf to 1,000 inf.
At the same time I lowered the price ceiling from several hundred K to 15k, initially.

The other thing that happened was that with a good, steady market for Ancient Bones (me) people were motivated to list their on the market instead of vendoring or deleting them.. Average supply was vastly increased. The average 'for sale' range was between 0 and 100 when I started. When I walked away it was up to several thousand.

Flippers raise the price floor (which encourages supply) and lower the price ceiling. It does not follow that Captain Casual is getting gouged- he was just as likely to try and buy an Ancient Bone during a supply drought when prices were in the hundreds of thousands as buy one for 10 inf.
With a flipper in the equation, he's guaranteed what he wants for 'market' price (or if he's patient, at the flipper's cost +1).

Without access to the dev's numbers we can't know for sure what impact a flipper has, but my observations suggest that they are value neutral at worst.

It isn't.

To echo Uber, I have an ar/dev that had been parked for YEARS due to various changes to the game that made playing him more of a chore than a joy. I un-parked him a while back with the express interest of seeing how much inf a 'casual player' could earn in today's environment without making any special effort (i/e, just playing 'normally', running contacts, teaming, whatever- no farming, no market games at all).


By the time he hit 50 he was nicely kitted out with 'good' IO sets (Positron, etc) and had enough in savings to make me laugh anew at all the poor-criers we get around here. I haven't looked at him in a few months, but I'll check his bankroll when I get home and post the total here.

Honestly, you earn enough inf just playing 'normally' to afford anything you want short of uniques, purples & PO's.

Anyone who's ever flipped in a focused manner has seen their niche collapse in exactly this way. You can do it indefinitely until someone notices, then you chip away at each other's operating space until there's no room left for profit.

I really wish my old thread on flipping Ancient Bones hadn't gone to feed the forum monster. It graphically demonstrated the birth, life and death of a flipping niche.

zombie horse can not be killed with stick!

URRRRRRR!

Our market is so simple a child can quickly figure it out, if they have the inclination.

I started from square zero with the market- I'm terrible at math, had zero interest or background with any type of economics more advanced than balancing a checkbook or adding up the cost of the stuff I added to my shopping cart.

And yet now look at me, a member in good standing of Club Eeeebil and a veritable prince of the market.

Did I achieve this eminence by enrolling in an econ class at my local JC?
Nope.
I thought the market was fun, I played around with it and over time figured out how and why things happened the way they did. I learned about the market the same way I learned everything else in this game- organically.

If that sort of thing doesn't interest you, no problem...SOs still work great!


Market whines nearly always boil down to entitlement whines-
"I DESERVE the 'good stuff'! Why should I have to make an effort when it should be HANDED to me because I pay a monthly fee?!?"

In this game as in life if you're unwilling to work for luxury goods, learn to make do with less.