seebs

UberGuy's post pretty much nails it.

There are several different prices for any given item. There's BUY IT NAO, which may be +inf. There's "maybe some day everyone will have bought as many as they want and someone will list one for 1", which is 1inf. And then somewhere between those, there's a sort of sliding scale of values like "how much I have to pay to get one in the next day or so", or "how much I have to pay to get one in the next few minutes", and so on.

For the most part, there's some amount I consider reasonableish for a given item, and I'll bid that much for it without even thinking about it. Maybe people can drive this price up, but it's small enough that I don't care, so whatever. An aggressive marketeer can certainly increase the Buy It Nao price to an arbitrary amount up to 2 billion by buying everything that costs less than that and listing at that price.

But in practice, if someone is trying to make money by flipping, there are two prices: The amount they're bidding and the amount they're selling for. Their sale price sets a floor on the Buy It Nao price. Their bid price sets a floor on the "buy the next one that comes in" price. However, unless those prices are pretty far apart, they're not making any money on this! Which means that there is a "get the next one that comes in" price which is substantially under their sale price.

If the sale price is too high, people will keep undercutting them. Again, the only way the marketeer can prevent this is having bids at high enough values that they're not making money. If the bid price is also high, that can set an effective floor. If "bid price + 1" is too high, though, over time people will buy Something Else, manufacture items some other way, or whatever -- and eventually they will saturate the marketeer's willingness to bid that price and have few-to-no sales.

You can probably nudge prices a bit, but if it gets too high, you end up with people doing stuff like running farm maps in order to generate stacks of alchemical silver to dump. Before the alchemical silver dumping, that stuff was consistently over 100k for a pretty long time. Months, at least, during which I could leave up bids in the 60k range and have them NEVER fill.

Dumping got it down into the teens for a while, and it's never really recovered that I've seen; I'm still seeing prices more like 30k than 100k. (And if I get around to playing a bit more, there will probably be more of that to come.)

The big question I have is: If I want an item, how much do I have to pay to get it?

And if you're buying stuff, and I want it more than you do, the answer is "1 inf more than you're paying". Doesn't matter what you're selling at, because other people can and will sell stuff. Just matters what the bids are. If your bids are enough lower than everyone else's that a bid above yours can still be too low to get filled, then you aren't actually buying things in that niche, and you will run out of things to sell (unless you're manufacturing them some other way, in which case you're driving prices down anyway by increasing supply).

So in the long run, it is not at all obvious to me that this "manipulation" is really particularly effective.

We never know about future sales, though I imagine they'll rotate through eventually again.

Only time I ever tried to affect the market, all I did was dump a few hundred alchemical silvers listed at 1inf.

This was one of the first MA arcs I played.

This contributed to my early belief that people looking for "AE teams" were RPers who wanted to do cool stories together.

I feel obliged to point out:

Names are not copyrightable, let alone copyrighted. Characters can enjoy copyright protection in some circumstances, though the exact boundaries vary widely from one court to another. Names can in some cases be trademarked.

I'm having a really time understanding how one could "make" people pay any price for anything if they aren't willing to. If I think something costs too much, I do something else instead -- either get a cheaper thing, or manufacture it in some way instead of paying that much. I leave a ton of low bids up on stuff I know I'll want, come back a month later, and have stuff.

I am a bit confused, and skimming the thread did not unconfuse me:

Is the free item determined once and then anyone who logs in can get it, or is the free item random when you log in?

I ask because the market contains things I unwant, so I don't want to go claiming things if I can't tell what they are in advance...

It is true, I think, that recharge would reduce the effective value of a PPM proc under the new regime, or rather, its relative value.

Say I have a power with 10 second recharge, and a proc that is tuned for 2PPM. That's about a 33% proc chance. Say the power does 100 damage and the proc does 50 damage; the net bonus of the proc is roughly a 16% damage increase, which isn't great unless I'm already at the ED cap. Now I get a bunch of recharge, reducing the power to 5 seconds. The proc chance drops to about 16% and the net bonus to about 8%. The amount of damage I do from the base power roughly doubles, proc damage stays the same, so the proc is about half as useful.

So this does mean that PPM procs are more (relatively) valuable the less recharge you have. This fails to bother me because nothing said their relative value had to be fixed, and PPM is a basically better design than flat chance-to-proc.

Well, that gives us a plausible upper range of about 168 trillion, assuming scrappers are at least on the high end of the total wealth count. That's... a ways to go, huh.

I would feel so good about myself if I ensured that someone got to spend an extra day running an AE farm before being harvested for organs. More importantly, I'd be supporting the people who put him there.