seebs

That seems unreasonable. Rare things are not supposed to be everyday commodities. The entire point of "purples" is that they're rare, and you don't automatically have a full set of everything in purple for every character.

But they're very desireable.

So we have two options:

1. There are none for sale.
2. There are a couple, but they're more expensive than most people are willing to pay.

Those are the only two possible states the market can be in. I prefer the second, because it means I have a choice.

They change how the market works, but I don't think they change it in the way you think they do.

Imagine that there's no flipping. AS costs 5k or 10k instead of 50k. What happens?

Everyone who wants AS (and there's a lot of them) starts buying AS at those prices. And then... All the AS is gone. Because there's more demand than there is supply. So now the market goes to having no AS at all, and you can leave bids up and hope you get lucky when new ones get listed, but to do that, you have to have your bid be the highest. So you end up with bid prices going up, rapidly, and then after a while bid prices are high, and people start listing at those prices...

And you end up with comparable prices, only they're way, way, more erratic.

Because there aren't as many of it as there are people who would be willing to pay 151M.

You claim this. Do you have evidence? Can you show us proof that it was flipped?

It's providing someone who wants it more a chance to get it at all, rather than coming to the market and finding none available.

This is how you manage scarcity -- you raise prices until demand drops enough to match supply. That has the additional effect of creating an incentive for people to try to raise supply. If I see that prices on something are temporarily high, I might go take a stack out of a salvage rack and list them... Increasing supply and lowering prices.

No, the person who wanted it enough to pay 175M benefitted, because if someone else had bought it and used it, there wouldn't have been one availabel.

You seem to live in a world in which people named after dolphins have a magical ability to percieve what the current asking prices for something are, and in which you are able to perceive exactly which sales correspond to which specific instances of a given item.

Also, you're now being contradictory, because if someone else might have bid a bit more, then that person would have won, and the person who wanted it for 151M would have lost anyway.

Seriously, your entire argument here is, quite frankly, droolingly incoherent. It doesn't even make sense. It doesn't even begin to make sense. With the exception of one or two database techs at ncsoft, no one in the world could possibly have the information you'd need to substantiate these claims, and the claims themselves are such as to inspire the reader to wonder whether you shouldn't be cutting back a bit on the lead content in your diet.

You keep making up particular scenarios, without any evidence that they've actually occurred, and then with laser-like precision, you focus on someone who wasn't there, didn't participate, and who may not even exist, and argue that he was "hurt" by the outcome -- even though you can't even establish convincingly that he would have been any better off under different circumstances.

What is your obsession here with disregarding well-established basic economic principles? Are you maybe a time traveller who comes to us from China during the Cultural Revolution, ready to kill "profiteers" for horrible crimes such as delivering food to people who would like food, and are thus willing to pay you more than the food cost you?

Huh?

In many RPGs I've played, it's been people with more troller-like abilities, or healers, that were best at soloing. There's a particular fight that comes to mind which could be soloed easily by a mildly-geared tank, with some effort by a moderately-geared non-squishy healer, and was virtually impossible for all but the very best-geared melee DPS. And a lot of others like that.

In general, tanks can solo a ton of stuff. Also often ranged DPS -- simply because they can often kill things before the things can reach them. I'm not convinced that it is "every RPG ever" in which melee DPS win at soloing. In fact, it's a sort of surprising claim to me -- the cases I know of where melee DPS do well at soloing, it's specifically because they're designed to be functional as tanks.

As it happens, that fits CoH pretty well -- the winning soloing ATs are the ones that are intended to be able to either tank or off-tank.

Pretty much.

If you cap prices, you drive things OFF the market -- because it's stupid to sell something on the market for 15M if you know you could get a private buyer for 150M. So there's even LESS stuff available. Don't believe me? Go buy some PVP IOs on the market.

This is surreal. The fact is, there aren't enough.

Have you ever lived in a place where there were price caps? Because I have. And what you get is weeks and weeks during which no one can buy any of something at all.

There is not enough supply. If there were "enough" supply, purples would be common, not rare.

Ye gods. I take it you've never heard of used bookstores or used car dealerships, huh.

What you propose would utterly destroy the market. We'd be lucky to see 1% of the traffic we do now, because it would be crazy to sell stuff you might someday want. People would be basically obliged to make personal SG bases to store their own salvage; a SG with more than two or three members would be non-viable, and not having your own base would be a cripppling disadvantage.

I feel like I'm watching someone declare that, if the government just banned pornography, there'd be less alcoholism, because that is exactly how markets work.

Exactly!

At one point, as an experiment, I got a stack of brass, then listed a stack of brass at 250k, and bid on a stack of brass at 500. A while later both orders were filled...

But that would be a STUPID way to try to make money, because in the week or so it took, I could have made more money by buying a handful of mid-range recipes and crafting them. Heck, I could have made more money by putting a few slots into bidding 150 inf on level 45 common recipes.

No, you've asked for twice as much.

You haven't necessarily doubled the price people will pay -- they may pay more than the asking price, or they may not pay your asking price.

The only way it definitely has an effect is if you make both transactions, in which case, it keeps prices down by reducing the amount of inf on the market.

Again, this would only make any sense if you could completely control the market -- if you could prevent anyone else from selling stuff you wanted to sell, for instance.

This was already answered in detail. You are making the mistake everyone makes when they first encounter the concept of economics: You're not taking into account indirect effects.

If I have a bunch of salvage, and I go to WW, and I see that some common salvage I have has zero bidders, I probably vendor it to make it stop taking up inventory space.

If I see there's a bidder, I probably list it at 1inf to make it stop taking up inventory space.

If the flipper hadn't been bidding, you wouldn't have been able to buy that item from me for any price, because I would have just vendored it.

So flippers increase the total supply that's on the market.

Now add in the fact that, since there are multiple sellers, they compete.

The net result is that prices are driven down. In the absence of flippers, you'd pay anywhere from 1inf to 1Minf if you wanted the item, and sometimes there wouldn't be a single one up for sale. Once the flippers start providing a consistent market -- one where people can always sell something and get more than the vendor will pay -- salvage becomes much more available, and prices tend to stabilize. Sure, there's still people paying more or less, but your chances of being able to buy something for a reasonable price have gone WAY up.

I'd rather have a 95% chance of being able to buy something for 50k inf than a 20% chance of being able to buy it for 50 inf, a 10% chance of being able to buy it for 100k inf, and a 70% chance that there are none for sale at all.

Long story short: I have no expectation that people like the latest poster child for "but the party who has 100% total control over transaction price is powerless, and the party who just has to list stuff and hope has total control" will ever learn anything. They don't want to; they're not in it to find out how things work, but to feel self-righteous.

But not everyone who reads here posts here.

There are often people reading who are looking for explanations, and posting real explanations gives them a good idea.

No, they really don't. AE is fun, but without any XP at all for it, I probably wouldn't play it nearly as much, and I'd miss some great stories -- especially stories that are really built for lower-level characters.

Look. There is exactly ONE way for them to eliminate the problem of people who don't know how to play. It involves turning off all the servers.

Apart from that, you're always gonna have people who don't know how to play. And it isn't because of AE, or Sewers, or street sweeping, or any other way people level. It's because the game has a much worse problem -- it has a lot of players who are too important and too busy to spend a minute or two explaining stuff about the game to newbies.

Fix that problem, and the rest is magically okay.

And how do you guarantee this? You gonna make a bet? Provide some evidence? Seriously, this is not how markets work. Flipping reduces total inf in the marketplace, therefore, by definition, it pushes prices down. Steady activity also tends to equalize prices out.

A guarantee based on guesswork or speculation isn't much of a guarantee.

The fact is, the stuff marked up out of the buyer's price range has no significant effect, because no one can buy all the brass that shows up on the market. It doesn't matter whether there's one seller or five thousand who are asking more than you want to pay -- if they're asking more than you want to pay, they're not participating in the market.

Except, of course, that a big pool of sellers makes people assume that prices are going down and list new incoming stuff for less.

TIP: Not everything is a Smurphy plot.

In other words... I'm not getting anything out of that market slot until SOMEONE OTHER THAN ME drives the price up higher.

Gotcha.

And yet! If you bid at 12k, and wait a day, all 10 of the 45k bids will be out and you'll get your order filled. And if you list at 1inf, you'll get 45k until the "smart" buyers are gone.

Like I said to you, the problem isn't that people are trying to sell you BS, the problem is that you have no comprehension of how this works, you're unable to walk through simple hypothetical scenarios to see what happens in them, you have no experience, and you've made up your mind in advance as to what Really Happens and will never let any kind of experience, information, data, or evidence affect you.

Have you considered running for public office? I understand they need people like you.

Honesstly, dark/dark is awesome. "Weak" is a bit strong. It isn't a super fast killer, but it's quite effective. It can take a little while to kill stuff at first, but since the stuff can't hit you while you're doing it, it's no big deal. You have amazing healing right out the door, and Tar Patch makes things die pretty fast -- it's just that it's recharging too much of the time. When you get more recharge in tar patch, life gets pretty easy.

Once you've got tentacles, fearsome stare, and decent recharge in tar patch, it kills decently. Not as fast as a blaster, but blasters can't sit there absorbing attacks and laughing at them.

And OMG FLUFFY.

This is not how markets work. Here's the thing. Say you don't wanna pay 60k -- you wanna pay 25k. You bid 25k.

You will ALWAYS get your bid filled before the alleged Evil Flipper bid at 11k, because yours is higher. And highest bid always wins.

So the flipper can never "scoop" all the low prices if you put in bids anywhere above their notion of "low". You will always get dibs.

On the average, it has little effect on prices -- it just evens them out. Actually, that's not true. Since every transaction takes 10% of the transferred inf out of the market, ALL trading of ANY SORT WHATSOEVER drives prices down.

But more specifically, it averages prices, mostly. Buying low increases demand on the low end, which means people are more likely to auction something instead of vendoring it. Selling high increases supply on the high end, which drives prices down. On something that everyone's gonna sell anyway, this just evens prices out. On something that people would otherwise likely just vendor, though, it can increase total real supply, thus reducing prices a bit.

Here's the thing. Say something is currently really valuable -- it sells for 100M inf. That means it's a good candidate for "sell high". So all the flippers start looking for ways to get it, and listing it. But if they all list at 100M inf, they create a situation where there's a lot up for sale and not enough bidders. So people come in and say "geeze, 100M's huge, why don't I list at 95M and get a quick sale". And eventually the price goes down -- if there really is enough supply.

Flipping can't create a sustained rise in prices. It can create a sustained fall. Most often, though, it just moves things towards the middle of the range.

Of course it did. Alchemical silver is more desireable. It's necessary for a number of high-demand IOs. Therefore, it's worth more. 50k inf or so seems about right to me; it's a core component in a lot of recipes that are in high demand. I know this because every time I decide to get a character set up with a bunch of frankenslotted IOs around level 25-30, I end up needing at least a stack of alchemical silver, and rarely more than five or ten of anything else. On the other hand, it drops less often than, say, brass or clockwork winders.

The people that this would hurt would be the people who don't want to spend all their time on the market, and just want to get some enhancements and move on.

If you think flippers do anything but move prices towards the middle of their range, you need to go back and learn some basic economics. This is not rocket science; it's very simple, very straightforward. Flippers drive the lowest prices up and the highest prices down, consistently. Take that away, and prices fluctuate even more wildly, and many more items will stop being on the market at all for days or weeks at a time.

Not true.

And I can list brass for 50 Mil... Doesn't mean I'll ever get it.

The difference is simple: If the seller's offer and the buyer's listing price differ, the seller's offer is the price used. The seller sets the price.

I had two of a particular enhancement listed. I listed them at 3 mil. I sold one for 5 mil and one for 8 mil. I did not set those prices; the buyers did.

It's an intentional change, 120-second-procs now work only while a toggle is active, or while an auto is active, instead of starting a two-minute timer. They're two minutes after you use a click power.