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MY OPINION IS THAT AT CURRENT MARKET PRICES PURPLE RECIPES ARE NOT WORTH THE INVESTMENT. And that the people willing to drop 25% of the inf cap on a single recipe should be investigated.
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why should people be investigated? because they have an easier time making money playing the markets then you do? if you haven't noticed the prices at the RMT sites has been going down drastically because, imo, no one is using them and they are trying to get people to use them. they are a dying thing in this game and soon enough won't be around. they had nothing to do with the skyrocketing prices, the AE did.
when people stopped doing regular farms and the supply decreased of purples, i watched them go from 50-60 mil a pop to 100 mil a pop. then as time went by and supply became nil i watched them go from 100 mil or so a pop to 200 mil a pop. why? because people had made enough money from the AE to afford it. obviously you haven't been apying attention to this or you would never have suggested people being investigated.
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LOL, I've hit a sore spot. Well, I hope you came across your inf honestly when you put 500mil or more on a recipe. This convo is going nowhere. Goodbye.
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you haven't hit any sore spot with me. and i have never spent anymore then 100 mil on anything. and seeing as how i make roughly, on the small end of it, 500 mil a week selling at the markets i have no reason to worry.
and you astill haven't answered the question as to why you wan't people investigated. simple to answer if you had any idea what you were talking about.
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OK, I'll come back to answer this.
I just figure that a person willing to pay real money for in-game currency is more likely to dump a large sum of said currency on a single item. In other words they have less respect for the currency than a person who actually plays, farms or marketeers to earn it. And tracking down the players who purchase inf thru RMT sellers would lead to the sellers themselves, making it easier to get rid of them. I realize some people have honestly earned very large sums of inf and they can do what they please with it. I just see 100mil inf = 5 hours work, and I base my bids on that. Whereas a person who's willing to pay whatever the going RMT rate currently is, simply sees 2bil inf as easily earned and easy to spend. I do believe RMT has a destabilizing effect on the market, especially in low supply areas such as purple and PvP recipes. I can't say how big an effect, and I don't believe eliminating RMT will seriously reduce prices, but will only alleviate incidences of crazy spending (like Beefcake's 1.2bil Panacea proc sale). So I simply had the idea that flagging large purchases for investigation would help track down RMT sellers, much like police will look for large luxury purchases to track down thieves and drug-dealers.
but what you seem to be missing is that you can not base what other people are willing to spend on what you make. that is where your half [censored] brain dead idea falls apart. and again, if you look at the ability to make money through AE and the drastic drop in RMT prices, you actually start to realize that the RMT people are trying to compete with the AE in terms of infl/inf. once they see that it is not worth their time because maybe 1-3 people are using their site they will leave. but that doesn't mean that all of a sudden prices will drop. what that means is that people are making more then the RMT can offer and have no use for them.
again, your idea has no merit and has had no merit since AE came around. maybe pre AE some form of this would have been half acceptable, but seeing as how infl/inf is falling out of the skies and jumping out of the ground and off the trees, it doesn't.
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So I simply had the idea that flagging large purchases for investigation would help track down RMT sellers, much like police will look for large luxury purchases to track down thieves and drug-dealers.
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Again, treating your paying customers like thieves and drug dealers is a suicidal business practice. Your idea is among the very worst I've ever seen on this forum, which places you in rare company indeed.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Thank you very much gentlemen, I will now withdraw from your company, having learned all I could from all of you. But my respect for all of you has considerably dropped during this thread. Special thanks to Smurphy for being the one guy who seems to be able to hold a conversation without trying to belittle others.
Tonality, I'm not interested in running an experiment with your Inf, or Smurphs, or anyone elses. I do not enjoy playing the market, and I am not disputing anthing you "experts" are saying.
For the last time...I'm not talking about any recipes or salvage besides purples. There are so few of these that one person can focus in on one specific purple IO and buy them all completely controlling the price pushing it as high as they want. Then the next person sees the last few sold for 400 million, so list it for that also.
I knew posting here was a mistake, because the only people that read this part of the forum are those that love to play the market. I don't, it's very boring to me. So I don't wanna do experiements or write professors or have big long drawn out debates so the entire marketeer mob can gang up on me. All I want is to know what I asked in my OP.
Devs....did you want purple sets to cost well over a billion inf? That's it.
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I can't say how big an effect, and I don't believe eliminating RMT will seriously reduce prices, but will only alleviate incidences of crazy spending (like Beefcake's 1.2bil Panacea proc sale).
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I think you give RMT too much credit for the market. How many people do you suspect that use RMT? Of my global, everyone that I team with works for those great builds (or they don't have one). Although that is only a sampling of the game, that implies that very few people do buy from RMT. Obviously somebody does, because they still send their emails. But I think the majority of the playerbase is not buying from RMT.
Therefore, it must be assumed that the rise in market prices is due to something entirely different: inflation.
There aren't any good inf sinks here. Low supply items continue to rise in prices as the value of inf continues to drop. Hmm, so let's just cap how much things can cost eh?
The USSR instituted price caps on just about everything that could be purchased. The end result was mass shortages and hoarding. Instituting price caps doesn't work, even if they are lenient. The only thing that helps is increasing supply.
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Devs....did you want purple sets to cost well over a billion inf? That's it.
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Serious question.
If you only wanted to know this, why didn't you PM a dev, as opposed to asking in a forum that may have had one Dev post in it ever?
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OK, I'll come back to answer this.
I just figure that a person willing to pay real money for in-game currency is more likely to dump a large sum of said currency on a single item. In other words they have less respect for the currency than a person who actually plays, farms or marketeers to earn it. And tracking down the players who purchase inf thru RMT sellers would lead to the sellers themselves, making it easier to get rid of them. I realize some people have honestly earned very large sums of inf and they can do what they please with it. I just see 100mil inf = 5 hours work, and I base my bids on that. Whereas a person who's willing to pay whatever the going RMT rate currently is, simply sees 2bil inf as easily earned and easy to spend. I do believe RMT has a destabilizing effect on the market, especially in low supply areas such as purple and PvP recipes. I can't say how big an effect, and I don't believe eliminating RMT will seriously reduce prices, but will only alleviate incidences of crazy spending (like Beefcake's 1.2bil Panacea proc sale). So I simply had the idea that flagging large purchases for investigation would help track down RMT sellers, much like police will look for large luxury purchases to track down thieves and drug-dealers.
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I don't understand your point tho. RMT sellers put their websites in every spam email they send. They're not hard to find. Tracking large purchases is used to find RMT buyers, not sellers.
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Devs....did you want purple sets to cost well over a billion inf? That's it.
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Serious question.
If you only wanted to know this, why didn't you PM a dev, as opposed to asking in a forum that may have had one Dev post in it ever?
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Cause closed beta is soon and all thier mailboxes are closed.
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Some of what is going on with the higher priced items is obviously flipping.
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So the fact that all the prices rises have been concurrent with mechanics changes is pure coincidence, then?
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Actually not all of them, some pool As rose in "bidding patiently" price due to flipping as the real bargains only came available when the flippers filled their orders, which was never if the flippers put enough bids up and checked them frequently enough. No game change hit say harmonised healing pool As I9-I13, but the price you had to pay on an "I want it in a week or so" top level recipe seriously went up in that period, and the history would show no recipes available and 3 or 4 of the last 5 bids at a the same weird flipper type price in the 100-300K range, with lots of enhancements available at 2-3M. I used to be able to buy the recipes at 5-30K if I was patient.
This may be the market finding its natural level, but it is stupid to argue that flippers by removing some of the bargains haven't raised the cost of some enhancements to some people.
An anecdote, before the mass outbreak of flipping, a friend bought all 3 of the main healing uniques for a total of 18M, try doing that even immediately pre AE.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
well, to answer your question: the purple recipes are suppossed to be ultra rare. ultra rare means hard to come by. ultra rare means not everyone will have them immediately. ultra rare means that as supply drops demand goes up as does the price that people will pay for them. ultra rare means that if people aren't dropping them because they are doing AE prices will go up because supply and demnad deams it so. ultra rare does not mean instant gratification.
i'd keep going but i would fill up at least 3 pages with what ultra rare means. 
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Cause closed beta is soon and all thier mailboxes are closed.
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I think it maybe that a good number of them are at Comic con and not able to access the boards
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
To go along with this:
Somewhere I read a statement that purples were intended to drop about once a month for the casual player. (obviously the farmer might get them more often)
If this is the case, one can earn 400-500 million inf just playing a level 50 character for a month to buy a purple. I also admit that AE has drawn farming to it, where purples are more rare. As a farmer, I'm looking forward to farming content again, so I know I'll be listing more purples (yesterday I listed 2).
I don't build my characters around purples anymore because the amount of time is not worth it - whether I'm farming or marketeering for them (yes, I'm evil and evbil*). I agree that they cost too much. A few lucky drops means I can completely IO out another 50 without any real work. It's great for me. Would I like to use purples? Sure.
*Said wealth is constantly being spread among about 40 characters to maximize flippage on large quantities of items. I suppose some day I'll stop marketeering long enough to get a nice screenshot (or someone can give me a bil for my PvP set 
)
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Some of what is going on with the higher priced items is obviously flipping.
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So the fact that all the prices rises have been concurrent with mechanics changes is pure coincidence, then?
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Actually not all of them, some pool As rose in "bidding patiently" price due to flipping as the real bargains only came available when the flippers filled their orders, which was never if the flippers put enough bids up and checked them frequently enough. No game change hit say harmonised healing pool As I9-I13, but the price you had to pay on an "I want it in a week or so" top level recipe seriously went up in that period, and the history would show no recipes available and 3 or 4 of the last 5 bids at a the same weird flipper type price in the 100-300K range, with lots of enhancements available at 2-3M. I used to be able to buy the recipes at 5-30K if I was patient.
This may be the market finding its natural level, but it is stupid to argue that flippers by removing some of the bargains haven't raised the cost of some enhancements to some people.
An anecdote, before the mass outbreak of flipping, a friend bought all 3 of the main healing uniques for a total of 18M, try doing that even immediately pre AE.
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The nerdy accurate wording is: Marketeers/Flippers/Manipulators are unable to raise the price of an item above equilibrium price and sustain a profit over a significant period of time unless the price elasticity of demand is incredibly inelastic.
Translation: Real marketeers can't raise prices above where they are naturally going anyway.
Flippers can and do raise prices in a shortage and reap a profit. The point is that flippers can't raise prices above where they are going anyway and turn a profit without getting "lucky." Sure you can paint the last 5 and sometimes idiots will come along and fall into your trap but there's no guarantee. If you've successfully identified a shortage, and the shortage isn't going to change, if the shortage is significant the profits are virtually guaranteed.
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Tonality, I'm not interested in running an experiment with your Inf, or Smurphs, or anyone elses.
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As predicted in the dead seas scrolls!
Or one of my posts, they're so easy to confuse....-
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For the last time...I'm not talking about any recipes or salvage besides purples.
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That doesn't matter- they all follow the same rules.
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There are so few of these that one person can focus in on one specific purple IO and buy them all completely controlling the price pushing it as high as they want.
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no they can't.
your persistent delusion that it can speaks to your absolute lack of market knowledge.
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I knew posting here was a mistake, because the only people that read this part of the forum are those that love to play the market.
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Imagine, if you will, this humble Goat wandering into a forum dedicated to mathematics. Now, I dislike math and have as little to do with it as possible. But let's assume that like you I have a bunch of hair-brained ideas about math I want to share.
So I post in some threads, and the mathematicians ask me questions I refuse to answer and posit experiments I refuse to perform, insisting instead on my own superstitious interpretations of what calculations mean.
Sound familiar?
That scenario is never going to have a happy ending.
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Devs....did you want purple sets to cost well over a billion inf?
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They intended them to be the pinnacle of loot in the game, and that costs whatever players value it at.
They don't get to declare what something is worth, the market dictates that.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
With some recipes selling for close to or at 1 billion inf, i dont see how a cap could make anything sell any higher. The drop rates are ridiculously low, imo.
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With some recipes selling for close to or at 1 billion inf, i dont see how a cap could make anything sell any higher.
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Get glasses?
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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If you want cheap purples you should try convicing everyone in the game to get out of the MA. Prices will drop right back to where they were pre-MA.
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This is why I've shelved my quest to purple out the Goat until after I16.
Between the inevitable nerfs to MA rewards and the ability to set the team size for your missions purple prices will drop fast.
I can barely wait to see JDouble's explanation for this inexplicable phenomenon!
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Aw, Goat you disappoint me. I gave you a straight line for the magic pony solution and you let it slide.................
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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With some recipes selling for close to or at 1 billion inf, i dont see how a cap could make anything sell any higher. The drop rates are ridiculously low, imo.
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because with a cap not only would there be a short supply of everything, but everything would be listed at the absolute highest. remember that salvage you were paying 100 for? guess what, now your paying millions for it. see now how that would work?
Too many people placing too much emphasis on IOs. When they were first introduced, I adopted a simple philosophy... I'll slot what drops, if it's a enough of a benefit to worth create. If I manage to create a set... cool beans, if not... ah well. Otherwise I sell it and and stay content without the .05% percent increase to my toe-stubbing defense, or the power to create an exploding rubber ducky once an hour.
8D
It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets
... Hit it ...
... Hit it ...
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So after issue 16 hits, supply goes up, purple prices go down. Won't the marketeers just buy low and hold them untill prices go back up, then sell?
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Nope, real marketeers analyze current trends and profit in the short and long term. Speculators invest then hold goods to turn around later for profit. The first is dynamic, the second passive.
A real marketeer goes where the profits are. If the profits tank (which they will in that scenario) the marketeer unloads all their stock and moves to a more profitable niche. The really smart ones go before the trend begins to show. The smart ones go as the trend begins to show and the "marks" are the ones stuck holding the bag on goods that they were too slow or dim to unload.
That can turn a bad marketeer into a speculator if they invested all their working capital into a single area.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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So seriously Devs, do you want purple sets to be THAT rare that they cost over a billion inf? It would seem this ridiculous inflation is either do to a.) all people do is farm AE which equals no purples, b.) folks are just buying inf from those dirtbag .com sites, or c.) a little of both.
I don't have an answer, but this [censored] is ridiculous. You put things into the game and then create a situation where only folks that farm AE 24/7, or purchase infamy from an offsite .com can afford to buy them.....which motivates people to farm even more and buy more infamy from offsite .coms. Please do [b]something.....
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<QR>
* The devs do not read this forum
* Any rarity in the game is put in there by the devs.
* Players that farm subsidise the rest of us. One ultra-uber-pvp-rare takes maybe an hour to add to the game, but keeps farmers occupied for weeks. That leaves more resources for the devs to add real content.
* It is actually quite easy to make 100's of millions in the game - just read this forum
* There is no moral component to the in-game market because it is just a game. Killing another player in a PvP zone is not immoral, so ripping them off in the market is not either. In both cases they have chosen to be in that zone.
* Even if one thinks there is a moral component to the market, one can make all the inf one needs by crafting items for sale, which is a constructive win-win activity
QR: I am amazed at the patience displayed by the market gurus in here, as well as the stick-to-it-iveness of the flat-earthers. But it's okay--as long as you keep your tinfoil hats firmly in place and believe that, while you don't play the game as much as other folks, you still deserve all the best stuff. Of course, you could just listen to the market gurus and learn, but that's just crazy-talk. Kudos.
There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.
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Devs....did you want purple sets to cost well over a billion inf? That's it.
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The short answer is, yes they did.
1) Their is no evidence that the devs read this forum.
2) If any of them do read this forum, they certainly do not post in it. There has been only one red name that ever posted in this forum. A Community rep that is no longer on staff and she admitted that she used the market exactly the way that you do not want it used.
3) Marketeers have been invited into closed betas. Myself, Catwhoorg, Smurphy, and Uberguy are 4 that I know have been there.
4) The above players have posted in closed beta threads what the market effect of game changes made will do to the market.
5) All of the posts the above players made concerning the market post issue update occurred almost exactly as predicted.
6) All of the current market situations were predicted and ideas to reduce/eliminate these issues posted by the above named players and others during those closed betas.
7) None of those suggestions were implemented.
8) As far as we know NONE of the developers have any kind of background in economics. There are lots of computer programmers and graphic artists but no one that actually has any idea of what game changes will do to the in game market.
So in short yeah, they wanted purples to cost a billion because they didn't listen to those of us that actually use the system and have a pretty good idea of how it works or they did listen and decided that the way it is, is the way they wanted it.
If they want to change that in the future they need to go get one of the bean counters out of their marketing department and put him on staff as a developer in charge of oversight on in game auction house development. Since they haven't done that..... yeah they want the market to function the way it does.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Considering Smurphy is offering to prove his point at his own expense, I don't think you have much of a leg to stand on.
I'll go even further with this:
Roll a lowbie on infinity for this purpose and I'll give you 25 mil inf. Here's the rules:
Experiment 1:
-Allowed Investment: 5 mil inf
-Target: Detonation, lvl 50, Acc/Dam
This is a cheaper item on the market so you can look to corner this with little expense. Your goal is to artificially raise the price and turn a profit.
Experiment 2:
-Expense: 15 Million inf
-Target: Demonic Threat Report
A common salvage, in great supply. However you should be able to wipe out this market with this much inf. Your goal is to sustain the market at your own price and turn a profit after the huge initial loss.
Experiment 3:
Expense: 5 mil
Target: Touch of Death, Acc/Dam, lvl 40
Try to turn a profit with this item. Identify the low price (somewhere around 250k-500k) and the high price (1-2 mil). Set up a stack of 10 for a round number (500k) and purchase 10 of these. By this point I suspect you have a net loss in both previous experiments, so I may need to give you more inf.
=-List recipes within the highest price in history.
=-Profit.
Keep any earnings you receive.
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What is my point in all of this?
In trying to make a profit off of the market, creating artificial bubbles is incredibly costly, and the chances of reward are highly tied to supply and demand. It can be done, but rarely sustained.
Rather, to profit off the market, it is easier to 'ride the waves'. By identifying what appears to be a low bid and purchasing for low prices and reselling for higher prices, small fortunes can slowly be earned.
If an item is listed significantly higher than what people are willing to pay, it will not sell. To maximize profit, one identifies what price is reasonable to expect a sale and also reasonable to acquire in a set period of time.
Most items at 'buy it now prices' can be purchased overnight at a reduced price. The exception are rare recipes, which have lesser degrees of fluctuation. For example, luck of the gambler redside fluctuates between 100-130 million, a very small profit margin. Whereas many other items have a much larger range of fluctuation because they are frequently purchased and produced.
The marketeer can ride these fluctuations and profit off of them, but these fluctuations are not created by the marketeer.