seebs

Generally, you can predict these in advance. If the weekend contains Saturday and Sunday, it will be busy.

I'm not at all sure of that -- I seem to recall some overlap when I was crafting a whole bunch of stuff. But even so, a few hundred people going for that badge...

No, with my mind open.

I have never seen any evidence that Nethergoat disapproves of any way of making inf in this game. I have seen evidence that Nethergoat believes, with good evidence, that none of the others are as effective in terms of inf earned per hour as the markets.

To be honest, I haven't seen much from either side that I would have done anything about, were I a mod. I might go as far as occasionally sending people a polite note to ease up a bit.

Yeah, pretty much exactly this. What matters isn't whether a given combo sounds awesome on paper; what matters is whether you enjoy playing it. If you don't, making it more powerful may not improve your gameplay experience at all.

I don't think it does. I think it mostly means that there's not enough market slots.

The primary limiting factor on listing things for sale is market slots, especially with enhancements. Even recipes, though, are affected -- because even though you can in theory list a stack, you're unlikely to have a stack of a single recipe at a single level.

Which means, unless traffic on an item is pretty high, it's not worth listing it -- you lose more income by losing one of your slots than you will ever get from the item.

There are tons of drops that are getting vendored or deleted because they aren't worth selling, even if they might occasionally be worth a lot to the right buyer.

If you never see them, why do you care?

The only circumstances under which you have reason to care are circumstances under which you can give them tips.

Very good!

And the same is true of supply at a given price.

Your claim was specifically that the flippers were preventing someone from getting something:

1. Right away.
2. At a cheap price.

And you've now conceded the key point -- in the absence of flippers, it's just as possible that someone can't get something right away.

No. I'm pointing out that every single time for the entirety of human written history in every culture in every part of the world, prices act in the same way: If prices are lower than supply and demand dictate, you sell out and then there's only a trickle of new supply.

But, and this is the big part:

The amount of demand is in part a function of the price.

If Alchemical Silver is 50k, fewer people want it than would want it at 10k. At a price lower than where the market ends up, there wouldn't be enough, and it would sell out. At a price higher than where the market ends up, there'd be extra, and it would accumulate until people lowered their asking prices.

The point is, there is not enough alchemical silver, ever, for everyone who wants it even a little tiny bit to get it. So there's only enough for some people to get it. That can be random chance or rationing systems, or it can be market forces setting a price at which there's enough alchemical silver to fill the demand from people willing to pay that much.

In other words, you're completely ignoring the entire human history of economics -- and yes, that includes the economics of things we can manufacture in much larger quantities than anyone needs them in.

Yes, we have a ton of people doing missions and getting drops. That's why common salvage which isn't used in very interesting recipes, or which has a high drop rate, sells for 1-10 inf hundreds or thousands of times a day. But, with all those people, there isn't enough of the things that are expensive to meet the demand there would be for them at 500inf or even 10k inf. So the price rises until demand is met.

But without the flipper, he wouldn't have had any chance at all, because it would already have been bought and used up at the lower price.

lolwut?

When I want salvage, I bid x123. That's if I want to use it to craft. You're just making up crazy stuff here. Seriously, if you keep up with this, you'll be showing genuine diagnostic criteria for clinical paranoia. You are imagining patterns because you don't have enough data to draw evidence-based conclusions.

That happens a lot. Try a slow-moving thing. Buy five of them. You may well find out that you can get one for 1k, the next price that gets you one is 5k, and then there's three at 10k.

No flipping involved, just the broad spread of asking prices.

If it was higher than they wanted to pay, they didn't place the bids. Except in the sense that, of course, we all wish we could get everything by bidding 1 inf for it.

Not strange at all. I tend to leave stacks of bids on rare stuff at 1m or so in case I get lucky, and there's no reason to bid on one rather than 10...

Yeah. Because, again, a fair chunk of the supply is people asking unrealistically high prices for stuff.

Come on, think this through! If the totally unevidenced flipper is in fact able to sell this salvage for 175M, that means that none of the other 20 listed were at that low a price.

You have not yet shown ANY evidence of this.

I'm not pretending. I'm reporting on things that have been consistently found to be true, demonstrated, supported, and shown, across every human culture, across every currency ever known, for every item that it is possible to trade. About the only thing that doesn't work this way is sex, because you can't resell it. (Well, you couldn't until porn came along.)

We even gave you a concrete, real-world, test case. Someone picked a salvage that was in poor supply with prices all over the map, devoted a couple of slots to bidding at a lowish value and selling at a highish value, and what happened? Why, supply increased dramatically and prices stabilized.

Every economic theory that has ever actually predicted real-world results would predict this. It is the only outcome that makes sense. We've explained the process, and the closest you can come to a response is to make up incredibly strange theories, declare that only a physically impossible thing can explain perfectly ordinary data, and then admit once that your entire theory falls apart in a multi-seller market.

But we're in a multi-seller market. The entire market is merged. And because of that, all this crazy talk about flippers controlling market prices on common salvage is just that -- crazy talk.

I'm done trying to explain this to you. If you ever suddenly feel like learning about the world instead of making up crazy stuff and declaring that it is what's true and all the textbooks and research results are wrong, you go ahead and do that. I'm not waiting around for you to suddenly realize that the real world exists and has whatever properties it has whether or not you can wrap your head around the complexities. *plonk*

But it's not insane! That's what those "commons" are worth -- because they're components in important stuff, or they aren't very common drops. That's normal for markets.