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I think the main reason why the market can be so profitable is because so few people do it.
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This is absolutely the case in my experience.
Take flipping, for example.
I start flipping something, anything.
At first I'm picking it up for 25k and selling it for 300k.
Some savvy player takes notice, and bids more and sells for less.
If I engage them, the buy price keeps rising, the sell price keeps dropping, and both of us keep making less and less off each transaction.
And if more than one other person gets in the mix, the process is vastly accelerated.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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I think the main reason why the market can be so profitable is because so few people do it.
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This is absolutely the case in my experience.
Take flipping, for example.
I start flipping something, anything.
At first I'm picking it up for 25k and selling it for 300k.
Some savvy player takes notice, and bids more and sells for less.
If I engage them, the buy price keeps rising, the sell price keeps dropping, and both of us keep making less and less off each transaction.
And if more than one other person gets in the mix, the process is vastly accelerated.
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For all of 10 items per order. Then you're both out of the game until you go back to the market and repost your orders. THIS, imo, is the reason it's so profitable. There isn't NEARLY enough competition to take up the slack 24 hours a day. You don't ever need to engage the competition because their orders will go down soon enough and then you'll be next in line again. All you need is patience.
Eh, I can understand calling marketeering aberrant behavior in the context of a super hero game. The game is centered around super heroes and super heroic behavior. Yes, there is some background for marketeering in the genre, such as Bruce Wayne. But for the most part, kids aren't reading comic books about super heroes buying and selling and making money. So I can understand the devs and most of the players wanting the game to center around something other than the market, even if some of us enjoy the market mini game. I can understand how it might be desirable to reward super heroic activities more than marketeering activities if that were possible.
But then, I don't think we're in danger of it becoming City of Marketeers. I'm sure I spend ten times as much time doing super heroic things as I do marketeering, and probably most people spend even less time in the market. So I don't really see any problem here, even if marketeering is significantly more profitable for the time spent.
On a rather different subject, I enjoyed the old Hami raids. Probably spent hundreds of hours on them. Had a Hamio'd toon, just for fun. I didn't PvP, just wanted to blow the [censored] out of bad guys. And there were the same sort of complaints of scarcity back then, why should the players with the Hamios be more powerful than those without. Well, because I put in hundreds of hours more effort than you did? But I think the complaints were justified on the grounds that for most people, raids just sucked. Nobody wants to put in hundreds of hours doing something they HATE for their shinies. Well, now they don't. You might still need to put in hundreds of hours to get them, but you have all sorts of OPTIONS of how you go about getting them. You can run Architect Entertainment missions. You can run regular missions. You can solo. You can run in big groups. You can do task forces. You can play the market. But no matter what you do, you're going to have to put in some effort if you want the uber lewt. It's just up to you what that effort is.
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
A couple of weird things about that thread in the base forum:
1) They reckon marketeers get more dev attention than marketeers, yet their forum has 9 stickied threads and ours has... one.
2) They reckon the devs reduced base salvage storage to benefit marketeers (huh? we'd make more money if there was hoarding-inspired shortage!)
3) It looks like if we're sick of being abused here we can go on any other board in this forum and get abused there.
I think part of the problem is that we have quite a few market haters that are regulars in this forum (you smacktards know who you are). They are the real griefers.
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I think the main reason why the market can be so profitable is because so few people do it.
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This is absolutely the case in my experience.
Take flipping, for example.
I start flipping something, anything.
At first I'm picking it up for 25k and selling it for 300k.
Some savvy player takes notice, and bids more and sells for less.
If I engage them, the buy price keeps rising, the sell price keeps dropping, and both of us keep making less and less off each transaction.
And if more than one other person gets in the mix, the process is vastly accelerated.
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For all of 10 items per order. Then you're both out of the game until you go back to the market and repost your orders. THIS, imo, is the reason it's so profitable. There isn't NEARLY enough competition to take up the slack 24 hours a day. You don't ever need to engage the competition because their orders will go down soon enough and then you'll be next in line again. All you need is patience.
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At one point during the Luck Charm conspiracy, it turned out that [in classic Law of Unintended Consequences fashion] we had to control the price of LC's in order to free it.
So we had to drive out a couple of competitors. In a very brief period about 600 bids disappeared from the market. . . you can buy and sell a startling number of items. If you have only 8 characters, low level, with only 10 slots each, that's 8 * 10 * 10 or 800 items you can buy or sell. A little more work (and a few existing characters) and you can have 1600 items up on the market.
If you're the sort of person who discovers that profit (for 20K per item, say) and sticks with it, instead of finding things that make you 2 million per item, you can put in a tremendous amount of work and make (on, say, 500 items a day) 10 million inf a day jacking up the price of Luck Charms. Or Alchemical Silver.
... Yes, there are people who manipulate prices. Not very many prices, and not many people, and it's freaking miserable work. When the market was new, someone manipulated Demonic Blood Samples for MONTHS until they either ran out of slots, or gave up... one day bids dropped by 1000 and the price dropped by a factor of ten. Man, that guy was annoying.
If I have a point, and I'm not sure I do, it's that "don't assume nobody will do it just because it's stupid and gives low rewards."
Urk! That was me. Accidentally logged in as my wife.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
I wondered who it was...
The best part of the Luck Charmers for me was selling all that other common arcane salvage I was getting while holding the luck charms for the big dump.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Hey, I didn't do the math on my Dark Astoria runs. Instead of burning a hundred million, I may only have burnt, like, eighty.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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...why there are so many "stuff is too expensive" posts: normal gameplay is no longer rewarding enough to be able to afford the best enhancements in what people consider a reasonable amount of time.
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While I fully support the right of all casual players to purple their warshades, this concept of 'normal gameplay' is interesting. Since I6(?) 'normal gameplay' has expanded to:
1) I1-5 mission content (Defeat all X, defeat X and buddies, escort X, and click X)
2) Villain content around #1
3) PvP zones, upgraded arena
4) Base development
5) Cooperative zone play
6) Revamped Hami raid, STF & LRSF
7) Market/IOs
8) Event-related limited run content
9) Cooperative taskforces
10) Player-initated content (zombies, Rikti invasions)
11) Player-developed content (AE)
And probably other stuff I'm leaving out. Which of these is 'normal gameplay'?
The point here is that CoX has always had a variety of "entry points" which most players can approach the game. "Reasonable amount of time" really needs to not be based on #1 anymore, though it seems there is a ready throng of folks that don't know it's not I4 anymore.
Perhaps if folks thought of it like going off the gold standard...
President of the Arbiter Sands fan club. We will never forget.
An Etruscan Snood will nevermore be free
"stuff is too expensive" people are silly.
I started my Claws/SR scrapper in February. As of last night, his build is completely finished except for Aid Self, which I'm thinking of dropping for CJ/Evis (which won't take too much longer to finish slotting). I have 4 LotGs, full Touch of Death, all 3 healing uniques, 1 Zephyr set, but no purples. And despite having acquired a lot of that in the past two weeks, I keep getting more and more money.
I tried flipping one day, and got bored with it and never did it again, I only made like 200k off it. I make all my money by selling what I earn by killing stuff. I'm at like 180 mil at the moment (current on hand inf, not total earned), which may not seem like much to the ebil brotherhood, but it sure seems like a lot to me. 
Normal game play can IO out a character in fairly short order, if normal game play doesn't mean constantly playing alts instead of your main.
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Accidentally logged in as my wife.
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Wait-- you married yourself?
Or... are you just really hardcore with the roleplaying?
The Cape Radio: You're not super until you put on the Cape!
DJ Enigma's Puzzle Factory: Co* Parody Commercials
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I'm not saying that IO's ARE out of reach, but many people PERCEIVE them to be. Which is why there are so many "stuff is too expensive" posts: normal gameplay is no longer rewarding enough to be able to afford the best enhancements in what people consider a reasonable amount of time.
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My 'casual gamer' concept stalker is sitting on 32 million inf at level 30, having done NOTHING other than play 'real' content, ghosting anything he could, selling his drops and crafting recipe drops that didn't require him to buy more than 1 bit of salvage (i/e, he got most of the ingredients as drops).
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This. On the way to 50, I did nothing on my dom but play the game as usual and sell whatever I looted, listing them at vendor price + 5%. I did maybe 2 TFs and rolled the merits from them, and didn't get any particularly good results. The money I got from that (maybe 75 million) was enough to get me within seconds of perma-dom by the time she was in the mid-40s.
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
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In my opinion, logging a character in for a few minutes a day, flipping slots, and profiting immensely, should be acknowledged by the devs as "aberrant gameplay" and steps should be taken to ensure that it isn't orders of magnitude more rewarding than playing the game "normally."
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I'm new here and I started a thread last week asking why it was so easy to buy a recipe, craft it, and profit enormously. The general consensus was that it's a choice the players make. Players are willing to pay for not "wasting their time" buying and crafting stuff. So I do it for them and make a ton of money. I don't understand how that's aberrant.
Could you please expand on your statement, because I've been trying to understand this opinion (you and many others like you seem to hold it) and I just can't. Like I said, I'm new here. I'm not trying to flame or troll or trap you, I'm just trying to understand.
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If you want to understand them, you need to disengage objective thinking about the markets and how they work and simply feel that it is wrong to use the market as marketeers do.
I've been defending the flippers for going on two years now and I just get ignored as a flipper by that type of poster/player.
They are stuck in the pre-I9 stores mindset we had for 3 years and some eventually get it and break out of it but most do not.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.