seebs

I don't make anywhere near that much, but I don't have any 50s, so I'm not getting the Super Awesome recipes to begin with. I have to actually buy recipes and craft, and I don't tend to have enough lying around on any given toon to go after the really profitable stuff.

... Although honestly, I could probably make a ton if I stopped worrying about profit margins and started just looking for largest net profit on sales. Making a factor of 10 profit on ten sales by buying things for 1.5 million and selling them for 15 is not as good as making a factor of 2 profit on a single sale by buying for 300 and selling for 600.

Yeah, it's amazing how much people will pay for stuff without even trying lower prices.

I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't do all purchasing on things without outstanding bids by trying 1 inf first. I know that's what I list at about half the time.

I just barely have a billion total, and I haven't got a single character over 35. I'd guess half my characters are under 20, maybe more. (Okay, let's see... Yes, just under half have made level 20.) But that's a billion after spending, I forget, maybe 112M for a miracle +recovery proc, which was Buy It Nao.

Actually, something just clicked for me:

Is the OP talking about prices for enhancements, or about prices for recipes? Because I'm pretty sure that, for most of the desireable stuff, the enhancements cost substantially more than the recipes. So that could explain why the OP is seeing a ton of stuff at "2b" that other people are saying goes for less.

If you really want to tank, "tanker" is hard to beat. Incredible durability, excellent aggro control. Won't do all that much damage, but you can outlast stuff. Really well-enhanced tankers exist who can stand next to an AV or GM, not use any click abilities, and not be in any danger.

Is the "need to run as administrator" thing something that could ever conceivably be fixed? I spent a couple of hours figuring out how to get CoH and the CoH updater to run without admin privs. I'm trying to be good and do all gaming completely in the sandbox.

One of my friends, who's been playing since ~2004, has about a billion inf.

I might have a billion among my toons too. (Just checked my little chart of who has what; 1,031 million total among 19 toons.) I'm still not very good at this, and I'm not yet very consistent about picking niches. I tend to be driven a bit more by stuff like "I want this". So, for instance, I have a ton of bids out on lowbie kismet +6% recipes, and I sell overflow but mostly I did that so all my lowbies could have +6% to-hit as soon as possible. The couple hundred million I've made on impeded swiftness damage procs is all overflow from my demons MM wanting to put one in the demon prince.

Okay, you know the "support/resistance" stuff people talk about -- there's a price below which there's too many people who think a stock is worth more, and a price above which there's too many people who think it's worth less, give or take.

In this market, those have another effect, because it's quite possible to have a lot of people who think something is worth a lot less than its current price, but who are compelled to buy it, not because they think it's worth more, but because they need it for something else. And similarly, a lot of people who think they can get more, not because they think it's worth that much in some objective sense, but because they want more money.

The former people will stubbornly leave up bids at low prices, and just leave them. For a long time.

The latter people will stubbornly leave up offers at high prices. For a long time.

There's something on the rough order of a hundred thousand players, and all of them except Golden Girl have at least two characters, probably more. Most characters I see have made it to the point where they have "at least ten" auction slots. So we're talking about something on the order of a million auction slots floating around. (Could be an order of magnitude bigger or smaller, but I don't think that matters; I'd guess bigger, rather than smaller, though.)

There are not that many distinct items. There's what, a couple hundred recipes, and the largest number of levels any of them comes in is 41 or lower, so there might be a few thousand stock items you could have bids or purchases on. (I guess SOs and DOs expand that some, but... who cares. "Few thousand.") That means there are probably at least a hundred auction slots theoretically available per type of item. And except for the specific case of selling enhancements, each slot can be a bid or listing of up to ten items.

What this means is that, while active play is dominated by the perceived shortage of slots, a big part of that "shortage" comes from people leaving ten slots tied up bidding on a stack at each of ten levels of a given recipe at 1/10 the going market rate. Or bidding 123 inf on level 53 SOs. Or whatever.

And that means that it's easy to end up with, say, 1800 scientific theories listed at prices over 200k, because the cost to some user of having the ill/rad troller he played to level 12 and never really enjoyed tie up a few auction slots is basically nil. And similarly, it's easy to end up with hundreds of bids of 10 inf on some item.

So we end up with a situation where the "bids" and "listed" numbers are meaningless on many items -- sure, there's a fair amount of active traffic, but it's quite possible that of the 2000 items you see listed, 1,972 of them are at prices you won't see more than once a month, and 28 of them are within an order of magnitude of the last five sales.

And thus, we have insane volatility on the edges.

Especially because, fundamentally, the prices of common salvage are totally insignificant compared to the costs of the other things going on. I think I paid 234,567 inf for... uhm. I dunno, something. I was doing three or four enhancements for my blaster. I bid crept on a recipe and saved over a million inf from the lowest of the last five prices. At that point, I could have bid 200k inf on every common I used for that enhancement and still spent less than the last purchase price of the recipe.

I think that last bit may be the reason all those people list things at ludicrous prices. In my first week or two, I remember being thrilled that I was able to sell a brass for five thousand inf. Five thousand. That's like half what it costs to buy TOs at level 7! For one salvage!

Later, I happened to see brass sell for 250k, so I listed some. It sold. So I had a character buy a stack for 500, and list a stack for 250k, and a week later, I'd made two million inf. Woah.

Now, if I list brass at all, I list it for 1 inf, because the cost of having to think about it or come back or do something else because the slot is tied up far exceeds the maximum price I ever expect to get.

I think the point of the question is: Do you have to actually list at a higher price than you paid, or is it sufficient that people pay that higher price anyway for no apparent reason?

Logged out, and suddenly the updater is downloading 182MB... of what?

I've not seen this before. Does this usually mean anything?

Your observations and experiences are curiously vague and unspecific.

Every time someone does this with a specific, measured, test, we get the opposite results of the ones you claim.

Do I think CAPs will stay high forever? No. Do I think they'd stay high for a while, while supply catches up? Yes. Especially given the amount of inf that people were generating from spiderling farms. We've only had a few days since most people were generating immense amounts of inf and no salvage at all trick-or-treating, and it will take a while before things come back to normal in general.

Here's a possible distinction that might explain the difference:

When the marketeers talk about "flipping", they're talking specifically about buying low and selling high. This does not change the number of things on the market -- except possibly to increase it by making slot usage more efficient.

It sounds like what you're talking about is "cornering", where people buy stuff low and sell only some of it -- the rest being destroyed. This creates artificial scarcity, and of course it would raise prices. And, since prices under a million inf are effectively too small to measure for a level 50 character, it's very easy to (at least temporarily) move prices from 1k to 100k or 500k -- it's not enough money to make a difference, so who cares?

And that does create the possibility of profiting, at least for a while -- the cost of the salvage you delete is so small compared to the markup on the salvage you sell that you can easily make money even deleting 90% of the salvage you buy.

But this works, by definition, only so long as the numbers involved are small enough that most players don't care. I've paid >200k for at least one low-level common salvage within the last few days... and picked up full stacks of the same stuff for 1k. The difference is, quite simply, too small to measure. It's not even a blip in the first three digits of the inf I have on my five or six richest characters. It's comparable to someone earning $100k a year, who owns a house, caring whether something costs $5 or $50. Yeah, sure, it matters emotionally, but it's a total non-issue. The time I spend trying to find something cheaper costs me more than the price difference. I do it 'cuz I'm irrational, not because it's actually a sound economic practice.

Interesting! I'm impressed that this could be done. It helps, of course, that those two salvages are used in a lot of stuff...

What I don't see is how this would prevent people from buying them for more normal prices. I've seen stuff running in high price ranges, and if I leave a bid up for maybe 2k overnight, it usually fills.

3 above. My level 30 can buy 33s but not 34s.

I just thought that it was *theoretically* possible that someone would have a source for the rumor or a link to whatever it was that someone misunderstood.

Someone on an in-game channel was saying that they'd heard (no source was given) a dire rumor that we wouldn't get respecs for I19.

Surely this can't be right, can it? Can we get a red name to confirm that we will indeed get free respecs? *puppy eyes*

Entropic Chaos: Chance to Heal. Good for T1/T2 blaster powers?

Looks like the kinetic combat triple at level 35 may be the win -- selling for more than any of the procs are!

ETA: Whoops, those take two merits too. Still, they're selling for more. But my toon with the a-merits can't buy level 35s yet.

So far as I can tell, the /ice chilling embrace aura does not need or use accuracy -- it just autohits. Yes/no?

I have two a-merits on a character.

What would you recommend buying with intent to sell it? Presumably one of the two-merit procs (or 10 random rolls, but that seems risky).

The ones I've seen talked about are:

LotG recharge
Numina +regen/recovery
Miracle +recovery

Are there others that are similarly valued?

I have a natural origin demons/dark mastermind.

She's totally natural. This origin is, in fact, one of the reasons that wise people might be a bit wary of her efforts to "dispel old superstitious myths about demons".