seebs

Well, sure. But at any given time, they are selling for less than anyone else is -- meaning if they weren't selling that item, no one would be selling it for that low a price right then. So it would actually cost MORE if they weren't there.

Now, let's take the famous example of the flipper buying something that someone else wanted for crafting.

Scenario A:

Lister lists some alchemical silver, specifying an asking price of 10k.
Flipper buys alchemical silver for 11k, lists it for 50k.
Buyer buys it for 50k.

So, clearly, if Flipper hadn't been there, Buyer would have gotten it for ten, right? WRONG. Here's what really happens:

Lister lists some alchemical silver, specifying an asking price of 10k.
Some Other Guy buys alchemical silver for 10k, uses it to make an accuracy IO he was gonna make.
Buyer shows up, bid creeps, and after a few minutes gets one for 80k, because that was the lowest price left on the market.

Buyer is better off; he paid less than he would have otherwise. But Some Other Guy is arguably worse off -- he couldn't get alchemical silver for 10k. But there's a whole LOT of Some Other Guys and Buyers and Listers, and the net result is, any attempt to analyze specific peoples' experiences is doomed -- you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison because there's so many thousands of possible scenarios. For all we know, Some Other Guy just leaves his 10k bid up, and when he comes back next weekend, he got his silver anyway.

True. And similarly, the people who were listing at 100k are worse off, because they can no longer charge that much.

In general, though, most people find that over time, they are better off when prices are more stable. Because that buyer who used to be getting something for 50, and is now paying 70, is also a seller who used to get 50, and is now getting 70.

No one disputes that prices in CoH are, overall, going up.

What's disputed is the assumption that the mythical "flippers" are somehow the cause, and the massive influx of inf generated by people playing the game is totally irrelevant, as are floods of new level 50 characters after a new expansion resulted in a few new sets being available.

We have two very compelling explanations in hand which are in and of themselves completely sufficient to explain the observed behavior of prices, but instead you're telling us that the "flippers" cause that behavior.

Well.

If that's the case, then riddle me this:

* We know that the flood of inf would normally be expected to raise prices over time anyway.
* Every time there's new sets or a new expansion or something, demand goes up (and since a lot of people are busy playing, there's a ton of new inf coming into the game).

... And yet, you're telling me that the price difference between "a while back" and "now" is entirely due to flippers. And yet, I just identified two maor factors which should be increasing prices.

So, if you're right... And the ENTIRE price gap is caused by "flippers", such that you would still be paying those prices from years ago if there were no flippers...

What are the major downward pressures on prices which completely trump the obvious economic impact of the factors I've pointed out? Because there have to be some, or you're just plain wrong. So where is it? Where is the huge outflow of inf from the economy which completely eradicates the effects of thousands of players generating millions of inf every night? Where is the massive decrease in demand for high level recipes and IOs, to balance the normal increase we get when a lot of people roll new characters and level them to 50 around the same time?

Ahh, yes. Language nazis. Like people who distinguish between "stealing" and "earning", those cursed language nazis are always pointing out when two things are totally different.

That's nice. Many people believe that "property" is "theft", too.

The problem here is, you're equivocating -- you're making a bad argument. Because you start by asserting that "flipping" means two different things, then you apply your theory about the effects of one of them to the other.

Only they don't.

And this is different from Player A's recipe ending up as Player B's slotted enhancement after Player A has made a profit how, exactly? Or different from Player C's recipe ending up as Player B's slotted enhancement?

Oh, that's right. It's no different at all. It doesn't make any difference who does the crafting. Crafting is a different way of making money that relies on creating value -- changing what's available. You ever buy furniture for more than the materials cost? If so, do you think the people selling it to you are "flippers"? How about restaurants? Do you pay exactly the cost of raw ingredients when you go out to eat? If not, does that make the restaurants "flippers"?

Only that's not necessarily the case at all. It might be that without the crafter providing a steady supply of bids, people would just be vendoring the recipes. It might be that without the crafter providing enhancements, the people who were buying enhancements would be buying the recipes -- and since they're impatient they might have bid 500k instead of 180k on the recipe. Or whatever.

You're just making stuff up! There's no particular reason for which your speculations about what else could have happened are any better than any other speculations. You're not showing any evidence that your speculations are more accurate or more likely. You're just inventing a scenario in which you'd have been better off, and asserting that that scenario is the ONLY possible outcome had someone not been crafting -- even though we all know of many other possible scenarios.

So complain about ncsoft/Paragon not building enough inf sinks into the game.

In fact, none of it seems to have anything to do with flippers. All it has to do with is the basic game design creating arbitrary inflation over time.

Again, flipping isn't crafting. But... Seriously, lots of people bid exactly whatever the last sale was at. For that matter, maybe some guy did bid that price on ten of the recipes, and got a bunch of 'em. So.... So what, exactly? You could have had that recipe at any time by bidding 186,775. If you didn't, it's because you didn't want to pay as much for the recipe as that guy did, so why should the sellers be penalized just because you object to people crafting?

On the other side of things: Crafting is sorta tedious. It can take a bunch of running back and forth figuring out what all the salvage you need is, and how many of them you need, and then realizing that you need an orange that's 3 million inf, and so on... And if you make 50M just doing the normal stuff you do while running around hanging out with your friends, why not just buy the crafted enhancement and save the time?

... Which is to say, it's exactly like why I buy a lot of premade stuff that I could cook myself. I know how to make homemade pizza. I can make dough, I can make sauce. I can make really nice pizza that I love to eat. On the other hand, it takes time. And I'd usually rather just toss a frozen pizza in the oven and get back to what I was doing.

I give. I was trying to figure out whether you were lying or clueless, but it turns out to have been a trick question. You're both. *plonk*

No, I understand them just fine.

Change over time is why this argument that flippers can magically raise prices is stupid; you might be able to raise them briefly, but it won't stick.

You can raise the low end. At least temporarily. But...

Unless you sell the items, you're just losing money doing that. And if you sell them, you will also be driving the top end of the price down.

This is stupid. All they have to do is watch for lowish numbers, bid 1 inf above the last low number, and wait a little bit. I usually give it half an hour on anything but oranges.

Seriously, it's that easy. They don't have to try to guess what your bid is -- if you're getting anything, they'll see it scroll past, and if your bid isn't showing up, you're not affecting the prices, because your bids aren't doing anything.

You seem not to be understanding the logical implications of a multi-seller market under the rules the consignment house uses. Specifically, you seem to think people can drive prices up by listing things at really high prices -- but they can't, because other people can always list for lower.

And yet, you can't point out anything I say that's not correct.

What people are bidding 2 million?

If there are any bidding 2 million, then the lowest listed price will be, by definition, at least 2,000,001. Otherwise all the ones at 1.8 would have sold. Your scenario is already self-contradictory.

Or let's just say that, typically, new people coming in bid 2 million. Okay. So every time they come in, they place a bid which will always win over yours.

Or might have gotten an even lower bid. Because someone else might have been bidding 300k. Or 100k. Or 1, exactly. And you haven't established that no one else had even lower bids up. In fact, they almost certainly did. So in fact, you've increased the amount that low lister got, because if you hadn't bid 800k, he would have sold for less to one of the other bids. Unless he was listing for more than all of those low bids... In which case...

But wait! Let's say you're not there, and our "bargain shopper" shows up.

If he pays anything under than 2M, he's guilty of stealing from the low lister, according to your logic above. But if he pays anything more than 800k, the low lister has gouged him, according to your logic here.

You're getting tunnel vision. At each point, when you look at a transaction, you're seeing only one side of it -- you're not taking the other side into account, or taking the other participants in the market into account.

Let's say you have a TON of money, and a TON of auction slots open, and you just fill the consignment house with bids at 800k, listings at 1.799M. Thus, any bid of 1.8M is guaranteed to fill, and any listing at or under 800k is guaranteed to fill.

What happens?

1. People who notice this pattern will probably bid a bit over 800k in hopes of getting one for less than the "always-available" going rate.
2. No one will list for over 1.8M, but people may list for less to try to get a sale.

So after you've been doing this for a while, there will be a pool of bids at, say, 850k, and a pool of listings at, say, 1.75M.

See what's happening? Now, for you to continue getting successful flips, you have to raise your bid to 900k and reduce your listing to 1.7M. And guess what the market does? It reacts.

And after a while, we end up with everything pretty close to, say, 1.2M. And now all the purchasers are getting a .8M discount from what you were saying people used to "bid". And there's a regular supply, so you can always buy for that price, whether you're in a hurry or not. And there's a stable market for listing, so you can sell quickly and get a decent price, rather than waiting an unknown amount of time to get 2M, or risking getting 50k instead.

Uh, no.

This is no more true of random number generators than it is of "genuinely random" numbers. It never has been. There is no more "getting stuck" for a PRNG than there is for actual random numbers coming from pure chaos.

No, it's nothing to do with computer technology. You can use genuinely random data sources and you'll see exactly the same "streaks". If anything, they are perhaps less common with some PRNGs.

It is by definition not "flipping".

Flipping is buying something to resell it. Buying raw materials in order to do work on them isn't flipping.

You just called Leonardo da Vinci a "flipper" because he bought paint and sold the Mona Lisa. THINK!

Those numbers are completely made up and unlike what actually happens in the market.

If you're going to just make up numbers which don't reflect reality, you can make anything sound better. I mean, I prefer dealing with flippers, and getting everything I want for 150 inf, to not having flippers and having to pay three million for a clockwork winder.

Since my numbers are precisely as evidence-based as yours, you should consider this argument persuasive...?

Not worth buying, just worth selling.

If there's not much traffic in an item, and there's no outstanding bids, a lot of people will vendor it. If the flipper consistently offers more than vendor price, people will start selling that item because they'll get a better deal listing it than they would vendoring it.

No.

Only, in general, he hasn't. In fact, he's by definition caused average prices to be lower by increasing the amount of inf destroyed and thus not available to raise prices.

Again. If you buy his, it's because his was the lowest-priced one on the market.

Nice try, but you still don't understand how the market works.

That is quite possibly true.

But.

Unless your price is the lowest price anyone is offering, you will not get a sale.

Yup.

And unless your price is the lowest price, you don't get a sale -- someone listing for less does.

And. Again. Unless the price you're offering is the highest bid, you don't get a purchase.

So if you weren't bidding the price you were bidding, they would have gotten even less for their item. Or it wouldn't have sold at all for a while.

You may think that, but it's not what actually happens. We don't care about your motives; we care what actually happens in the game. And what actually happens is, every purchase you make happens because you were bidding more than anyone else, and every sale you make happens because you were asking less than anyone else.

Well, actually. Your post is pretty good at this. The post you were responding to was 100% simple literal truth.

You still don't get it.

If he paid any price at all, he paid it because his bid was the highest. Period. Otherwise, his purchase would never go through.

Similarly, if he sold at any price at all, he sold because his price was the lowest. Period. Otherwise, his sale would never go through.

And you're totally wrong about the "highest price" thing. Flipping can only be effective if you have volume. That means you list at the lowest price where you're happy with your profit. You don't waste time trying to get higher prices; higher prices come from impatient buyers offering bids without any attempt to find out whether lower numbers work.

Seriously. I listed stuff for 7k, some of it sold for 400,000. When it sold, it sold because my 7k was the lowest asking price. That means that every sale between when I listed it and when I got my 400,000, went to someone who was asking less than 7k. And it took a day or so to sell. During which many people paid 100k or more. Every one of those people bid a 6-figure number on something when there was at least one for sale for less than 7k.

No, it really isn't.

Only by people who want more than anyone else is willing to pay.

You don't seem to have cause and effect down yet.

The crap that sells for 5 a piece doesn't have any "flippers" working on it because it's not possible to make any money on it.

You have not yet provided even a shred of evidence that the price of alchemical silver reflects "flippers" rather than plain old supply and demand -- alchemical silver is heavily used. I mostly do yellows and oranges, and I probably need at least 10 alchemical silver to equip someone in the teens or twenties.

Well, you would if you looked. It was on white salvage that the experiment was tried. Pre-market merge, redside ancient bones. They were selling for anywhere from 100 to 100k, and there were plenty of times when you could bid 70k and not get one, but you could bid 1k and have one ten minutes later... or three days later.

So one of the marketers just started flipping 'em. Ton of bid offers at a lowish price, started listing them for a higher price.

Within a week or two, ancient bones were consistently selling for a mid-range price, and there were always plenty listed.

And what makes you think that "vendor prices" would ever have been an option? The reason alchemical silver is so expensive is that it's used in a ton of recipes people really want to craft. I'll pay 50-100k for it, because I just spent 5M on a recipe and I want to use that enhancement now. Sure, I put up lowball bids, but I don't expect them to go anywhere, because the stuff is just plain too valuable -- there are too many bids higher than those lowball bids that are not getting filled because there isn't enough alchemical silver being generated by the game.

See the "Neverselling Ice" thread.

But they don't really have anything to do with that. On the really rare stuff, there's not enough supply, and the erratic nature of the supply really shows up.

Here's the thing.

Let's take a look at Generic Purple. Generic Purple has a "fair market price" of about 100M -- basically most people think it's worth that.

Most of the time, there will be bids up around 100M, or supply up around 100M. And those can go either way.

There will also be a bunch of lowball bids. Some joker bid 1inf because hey, you never know. Someone else maybe bid 25 million on everything in the set at level 30 and is hoping to get lucky in the next month or so. So now, what happens is, every so often, there's a random streak of drops of Generic Purple, and what happens is, all the buyers around 100M get theirs. And some guy has a Generic Purple, and really he doesn't care that much, he's not into having the slot tied up for a few weeks, and he just wants to get rid of it, and figures hey, I'll just list it for 1, because he knows he'll get the highest bid.

Only right now, the highest bid is 25M.

So, his sells for 25M.

Now, an hour later, some other guy comes along. And he wants Generic Purple. NOW. So he bids 25M. Nothing. He cancels and bids 50M. Nothing. Cancels, bids 100M. Nothing. Cancels, bids 200M. He gets one. For all we know, it was listed at 100M+3.

See, you're making a mistake, which is a pretty understandable one. You're assuming that adjacent transactions are in some way related or connected. They're not. There is no reason to believe that it was the same guy who bought at 25M and sold at 200M. Even if it was, that doesn't mean he listed at 200M. It could just mean that someone was in a big hurry. Maybe impatient guy just bid 200M each on the whole set because he didn't feel like waiting and he has more inf than he knows what to do with anyway.

Lemme give you a concrete example. A while back, I made a mistake. I was tossing out lowball bids on level 45 and 50 common IO recipes with intent to vendor them. (Great way to get an initial nest egg at level 8 or so.) So I bid 5k x10 on To-Hit Debuff.

... Oops. I just bid on the crafted enhancement when I meant to bid on the recipe. And I won 6 of them before I could click cancel. So I have this level 8 peacebringer who now has six pretty much worthless level 50 IOs. So... I figure I'll list 'em at 7k, because 7k less costs will leave me not actually losing money on the deal.

The average price I got on those six IOs was around 200k. One of them sold for over 400k. Keep in mind, I had them listed at *7k*. The person who paid 400k did not try ONE bid at ANY price between 7k and 400k. Not one. Didn't bid 10k, didn't bid 100k, just started out bidding 400k.

That's not high prices caused by me flipping; that's high prices caused by impatient people none of whom even TRIED to bid lower numbers.

No, you're paying less. Or, alternatively, you're paying rather than not paying because there aren't any.

Yup. The problem is that you aren't walking through the whole economy to see how the flipper's actions affect other peoples' actions.

Completely inaccurate. Again, we are not talking about speculation or guesswork; the experiment has been tried, and we have seen the results.

If you take an item which sells for wildly fluctuating prices, and sometimes there's no supply within a factor of ten of the "normal" price, and add a couple of flippers who do nothing at all but place tons of bids at lowish prices, and list at highish prices, within a couple of weeks the item has a stable supply at a price somewhere between the low and high end of the previous range.

That this should happen is pretty much obvious.

Most salvage, if I'm gonna sell it, I'm gonna sell it by listing at 1inf and not even looking. But wait! Most of the time, I get under 1k inf. Or even under 250. Which means I'd be better off vendoring... So a vendoring I go.

Now, what happens if that flipper is there, consistently bidding more than the vendor will pay me? Why, I always sell the item at the marketplace, because I'm guaranteed to get at least that good a price -- better if anyone's bidding at higher values.

Meaning more of the item in question go on the market to begin with.

Seriously, this is very basic economics. Flippers, in general, stabilize prices by driving the high end down and the low end up. They make it easier to buy things for predictable prices. Now, those prices may not be as low as you'd like -- but in the absence of a flipper, either you'd be paying more or you'd be waiting a longer time for your bids to fill. Or both.

I'm not at all convinced of this. I had a character who was thinking about stamina, but I couldn't really fit it in the build, so I frankenslotted for recovery bonuses. Got about 2/3 of the recovery that stamina (unslotted) would give... and that was plenty. No longer running out of blue.

At any given time, in CoH, the total inf available is finite. Yes, you can make more -- but people are making more whether or not inf destruction is happening.

Inf destruction tends to reduce inflation, or potentially create temporary deflation. Since it would take time to come up with another two billion "new" inf, it slows the inflation down.

Furthermore, in the real world, there isn't a fixed amount of money, because banks can lend more money than they have, and people can borrow against things like stocks.

Say you have 1000 shares of Apple, and it's at $280. You "have" $280,000. You can borrow against it. But if Steve Jobs dies, suddenly Apple drops to $140, and you only "have" $140,000.

Again, this just happened on a very large scale within the last couple of years. Suddenly a lot of things stopped being worth money, and "net worth" was uncreated.

Unless you are under two years old, you just lived through exactly the situation we're discussing.

What happened to housing prices when a huge amount of "money" in the housing markets suddenly ceased to exist?

Here's a hint: They didn't go up. And they changed a lot.

And what that has meant, in turn, is that other prices have been effected. Thus far, they haven't gone down -- because various world governments just created (by fiat, because they're governments) enough money to mostly fill the gap.

Because in a real-world economy, deflation is incredibly destructive and can result in millions of people starving. (In a real economy, deflation means that investment becomes stupid. Deflation can completely destroy an economy. Lucky for us, video games don't face the same pressures.)

But think about it. We just saw hundreds of billions of dollars pushed into the economy to keep it from collapsing. Collapsing how? Collapsing in that since there was no longer enough money to continue paying existing prices for things, they'd have to either cost less or not get sold.

See? Take away money, prices drop. Prices on some things drop, and generally, as a result, prices on other things drop one way or another. In the real world, that's dangerous enough for people to commit to paying higher taxes for fifty years or longer to avoid it. In a video game, though, it's harmless; no one cares whether the inf they're spending today might buy more stuff a few months from now, because they'll have more inf by then anyway.

But seriously. We just saw this happen on an epic scale, resulting in record unemployment, billions of dollars of wealth disappearing from all sorts of people, and so on, and you're acting like this is unheard of and speculative? IT JUST HAPPENED. Like, in the last two, three, years. Repeatedly.

Okay, will try to explain.


Basic economics: Prices reflect the relative values of items. Including money itself.

Imagine that I make $10 a day. If you ask me to pay $5 for lunch, I'm probably gonna say no, because that's half my day's pay.

Now imagine that I make $100 a day. If you ask me to pay $5 for lunch, whatever, that's 1/20 of my day's pay, I might as well.

This applies to everything. And what that means is, if there's more money around, the number of money something is worth will go up. If the average player has ten million inf, very few things will be worth much over ten million inf. If the average player has one billion inf, ten million inf has become pocket change.

The general default state of MMO economies is inflationary, because there's supplies of incoming money. Developers try to build in ways for money to get lost, too, to balance this out.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

It's probably not a big enough thing to make a difference, but it's certainly basically sound.

Because the amount of inf the game generates and hands out to people across tens of thousands of players far exceeds the capacity of a couple of players to meaningfully affect the amount of inf available.

Yes.

Wrong.

Because what matters is not just the supply of items but the supply of money.

Think about it this way. You're used to thinking in terms of how much inf an item costs.

Now think of it from a seller's perspective. I have a big stack of endredux enhancements, I want to use them to buy inf. How many enhancements do I need to buy a billion inf?

You're aware that, when the supply of an item massively increases, the prices tend to drop, right? That works for money, too. If the supply of money massively increases, the "cost" of money -- in terms of anything else -- decreases. Which is to say, the prices of those items go up.

It really is pretty straightforward. If there's more money around, each individual unit of money is worth less.