Flipping for a week, and ... something happened...

So I just started doing this flipping thing early last week (I'm on the redside market). I randomly picked [common salvage] and went to town, buying them at 10k each and re-listing them at 75k. In the span of Tuesday-Friday, I had made about 20 million inf. I know it's not much to the people who actually know what they're doing on the market, but for a level 22 I seemed to be doing alright. The weekend was coming up, though, and I had a theory about weekends.

In this theory, weekend prices plummet because many more people are playing and dumping salvage at the market. I planned to stock up on salvage cheaply and hold it until the weekdays. Again, theory was that "weekday" people are the kind that play all the time and have tons of inf to spare, so I could sell higher than normal.

The theory... wasn't exactly accurate. It seemed the prices soared, and I sold quite a few of my stacks at 150k each or more... I haven't been able to buy ANY at the 10k "usual" yet either.

Do prices normally skyrocket on weekends? Could my excessive flipping last week have driven the prices that high? Are there other factors I'm not seeing?

What is most likely going on here?

This weekend was a little weird for some reason. (Latest AE sploit? I dunno.)

Generally there are higher highs and (maybe?) lower lows on the weekend- spikes early Friday night and Sunday night (although I think some of that's moved to Thursday and Monday) with some deep valleys, I think in the middle of Saturday night.

The working theory, last I heard,was "People who play on the weekend get online Friday night, their recipe got bought sometime during the week, they want to get on and play as fast as possible, so they Buy It Nao. Middle of the weekend, people fill up and dump their salvage and get back to playing. Sunday and Monday night, people take the time to fill their empty slots and you have shortages again."

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What is most likely going on here?

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I think one of the causes is that there are a lot more people doing what you're doing than there used to be. They were likely attracted to the practice when MA gutted supply, even on items that used to have thousands for sale.

It's worse on blueside. On one particular item, I've seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of orders placed for X amount (I know, because I filled almost all of them). That was obviously just one person, filling up transaction slots on 3-4 characters. Add in his competitors, and you have around a thousand bids of "artificial" demand.

On another common salvage item, which, pre-MA, often had 0 bidding, there were around 200 for sale, and over 600 outstanding bids.

Problem was, all those bids were 100 Inf and below.

And the practice is probably being amplified by more people buying stuff up in preparation for 2XXP weekend.

The supply is coming in, and my sense is that it's now close to pre-MA levels. Items that, for whatever reason, haven't been subjected to this attention, are now ambling along comfortably, the standing supply on them no longer dwindling at an alarming rate.

But items that went into the "danger zone" immediately after MA's release are still being heavily manipulated. It's probably going to stay that way until we get a big dose of regular content, and we get a supply flood that makes the practice more trouble than it's worth.

Based on past experience - I'm guessing its due (at least in part) - to people stocking up on Common Salvage to build Common IO's.

With the idea being to sell tons of them during this weekend's Rikti Invasion, and/or the upcoming Double XP Weekend.

It may be a tiny bit early to start stocking up for Double XP weekend. But, I think it really depends on what your marketeering (Lol, my spellchecker wants to change that to racketeering ) er... marketing toons are doing ATM.

Like, how many toons/alts does a person play total?

Then, how many of those do they use the Market with - to a significant degree?
How active those toons/alts are - so far as, How often do you log them in?
Maybe just every 21 or so days to check their market slots & whatnot, and then relocate to a new DayJob spot.

Or it might/could be every couple days - If your selling lots of Commons IO's with a fairly high turnover rate.

Or possibly... Less often, if those toons are working slower-turnover, higher profit per sale 'niches'.
Or they're using them to put in lowball-ish "patient bids" on Recipes/Salvage/Set IO's for stuff that they don't mind waiting awhile (like, say 21+ days) to get a spiffy deal on.

So (IMO), there's quite a few things coming up in the next couple weeks, that could be affecting the "normal" typical/average day-to-day, week-to-week cycles.

Then there's the whole AE tickets thing going on & affecting salvage prices in an entirely "new" manner, compared to last time we had a Double XP weekend on the horizon...

That's my take on it, at least


Also on a possibly related note:
(If I'm not mistaken), there are a fair number of semi-recent "returnees" to the game, who've seen lots of new (to them) shinies they "need".
So... now they're playing catchup & focusing on making Inf like crazy and getting drops/tickets/merits = (farming whatever they find has the best return for the time/effort invested - not necessarily AE stuff - for awhile there it was definitely the Arena for PvP recipes).

And, on the 'semi-bright side', they're spending [u]"fairly large" (but relatively small) chunks[u] of that Inf on the more common-ish stuff for right "nao" = IE: so they can get back to generating Inf/wealth ASAP.
Then at the end of the day (so to speak), they're marketeering their butts off buying and selling to acquire the high-end/rare stuff for their various "pimped-out" builds.
The 'non-bright side' of this is that inflation seems to be cruising right along faster than ever!

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

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Like, how many toons/alts does a person play total?

Then, how many of those do they use the Market with - to a significant degree?
How active those toons/alts are - so far as, How often do you log them in?

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1. I guess I have well over 100 alts. I probably "actively" play a few dozen of them, for a given value of "active".

2. I actively market with 2 heroes / 1 villain on Virtue, 3 heroes on Freedom, 1 hero on Liberty and 2 heroes on Victory. So 9 characters that I work hard at turning a profit with.

3. I log in the above 9 characters at least once a week. I log a couple of them in much more often, but since it can take a while to log them all in I'll ignore some of them for up to a week at a time.

Just FYI. I have no idea how others do stuff.

I know in WoW, over the weekends a while back you could sell "salvage, kinda" (Herbs and Minerals and such) for extreme highs on weekends declining sharply as Sunday night approached. During the weeks that stuff could drop so bad you would eat your socks. Meanwhile, crafted and rare sell-able items (recipes/crafted IO's, kinda) were cheaper on the weekends and skyrocket over the week. What's all this to do with CoX? I dunno actually, it's not very analogous to CoX. doh... All I know is we used to get sad when the weekends, ends.

In CoX there seems to be more stuff on the market over the weekend and the natural tendency is to undercut a bit to guarantee a sale or, simply, supply goes up demand goes down. Unfortunately we get wild spikes due to things like double xp weekend and AE farms creating wacky ripples throughout the game so where we should have an influx of suppliers providing commodities in the market and lowering prices instead we get a bunch of trophy 50's trying to kit out and get out.

Err, so, weekends I think make things cheaper with spikes you can generally avoid if you don't "BIN."

Flipping in WoW was really simple.
For a while I was up really late, so I'd just grab stacks of anything I could find that was underpriced & re-list it. It was usually gone when I checked in the next day.

I was on a pretty busy server though.