Being Ebil and My Experiences
By
DumpleBerry,
Posted on: 2009-09-17 10:35 in The Market and Inventions
I'm flattered, but stupid on red-side. I still can't muddle my way into a profit over there to save my life. 
All my Brazilians are blue-side. 
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.
There is no reason to feel guilty.
High prices are a selling opportunity for people who get drops. So while you and others spend your time flipping, I get to be out blowing up pixelated foes and gathering the drops to bring to market.
If the prices were all as low as the market haters wanted, I'd be vendoring my stuff, I wouldn't have millions on every character, and I wouldn't value IOs in my builds.
Besides your flipping rinses inf through the system twice helping to remove it from the game which is why the devs have market fees in the first place.
You are providing a public service for me and my kind (blow em up and sell the lewt players).
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
I feel reallly guilty about one thing I did. This was a while back, I use the BM/WW to transfer inf across servers from my rich toons to my lowly poor toons on other servers. I used a lvl 12 Steadfast Protection: KB protection recipe to do it this time, my general strategy was; buy all of the ones that are for sale, put one up for sale at high prices on my poor guy, then I'd buy it for prices that were slightly out of wack with the rest of the prices to say the least 
So this time I bought one for 20 mil, previously they were selling for about 5 mil each. Over the next few days I returned to the market and checked out the KB protection recipes, to my suprise all of the last 5 transactions on the lvl 12 Steadfast Protection: KB Protection recipes were for 20-25 mil! At first I burst out laughing at how stupid the buyers were when they could have just checked at a lvl lower or higher and the price would have still been at around 5 mil, but then I checked them and to my disbelief they were the same. I checked most of the Steadfast Protection KB recipes and they were all costing 20-30 mil Each!
I desperately tried to put the prices back to normal by selling the surplus lvl 12 Steadfast protecton: KB protection recipes I had (from when I buyed up all the stock to make sure I bought my own for high prices) I put them up for about 1 mil each and the all sold for around 15 mil, at least this was lower than 20-25mil I thought, but this was still an increase of 300% on the original price, and all the other levels of the recipe were selling for the same price. Over the next week or two the prices lowered to around 10 million each when buyers noticed the discrepancy between the prices of Steadfast Protection and say Karma KB protection recipes, this of course involved the prices of Karma recipes going up aswell. So in the end I made a large profit (accidentaly) and raised prices all around the board for KB protection Recipes by around 5 mil for about a month, I still feel guilty about those people who bought them at such high prices, I try to ease my pain by thinking about anyone who didn't look at the other level ranges for recipes before buying them for 5 times what they a level or 2 away. Another thing that helps me cope is imagining how happy I must have made some lowbies when they discovered their recipe was worth 25 mil
Here's my experiences of being ebil.
I've hit the 2 billion inf cap (from around 100m starting capital) on 4 characters now (3 redside, 1 blueside), with 2 more characters over halfway there, mainly from marketeering schemes (though I have spent a lot of it on my VEAT + Blaster builds). I don't feel that ebil or that rich, tbh. Inf just seems stupidly easy to make nowadays - inf is almost meaningless to me except for the few occasions when my ambitions have outpaced my rate of earning, but luckily I can be patient - that is what separates me from the players I make inf from.
I've only been seriously marketeering since late Feb 2009. Before that I didn't feel ebil when I did arbitrage (mainly buying L50 Acc/Dam/Rchg/EndRdx/Heal recipes and vendoring them). I didn't feel ebil because I was just removing surplus recipes from the BM/WW that people were selling below vendor value (and probably giving them badge credit in return) - I wasn't creating a scarcity because you can always buy those recipes from an invention table. That was before I realised my 5m per night total net profits across 3 characters for 30mins "work" was rubbish compared to what I could be making from other schemes
I don't feel ebil when I'm buying set recipes and salvage cheaply, making up the IO and selling it on for a decent cleared profit. Most of my inf earnings for the last 7 months have come from this (usually at least 5m per-slot every 1-2 nights, preferably 10m, 20+m rarely). Best overnight ever was 190.5m cleared profit from all 20 slots on 4 April 2009 (though I've made more in one night from selling looted purples, but that's not too often as I don't farm).
On average it takes me 3-4 weeks to make 1 billion inf cleared profit per character doing this on redside and a bit longer blueside. I find redside more profitable as scarcity makes for eager customers and higher prices, and somehow wider margins (I guess because the redside market is slower to react to trends as it has much less traffic than blueside).
I don't feel ebil doing this because I'm offering a service to extremely lazy people with too much inf who can't be bothered to make their own IOs 
I use the daily price differentials between the EU and US peak-times (and balance volume and margin so I can shift 5 IOs per night in each of 4 niches per character I'm marketeering with - the key for me is to stay diversified and not get too greedy) - some people aren't that patient, so I can't feel guilty profiting off them while providing them with what they want now (that I stocked up on earlier). I list below historic prices to ensure that my stock shifts - heck, I'm a saint!
Yet I always bid patiently for bargains in advance when buying IOs to use for my own characters - anyone could do that - so I can't feel guilty for those that don't.
The only time I felt slightly ebil was when I tried flipping salvage, just from curiosity. I didn't find the returns were worth my time investment, but I did feel guilty because I was moving historic prices upwards by a large margin (and thus trending the equilibrium price upwards with it). By comparison my buy/create/sell schemes tend to move IO prices downwards over time (as I list lower than equilibrium to shift stock) without too much effect on recipe prices (I don't get too greedy and tend to use mid-to-high traffic niches), so it almost feels like a public service 
One case of flipping made me feel especially guilty. Before the I14 patch I bought 18-20 slots worth of rare high level salvage on each of several characters (3-4, I forget - I didn't keep records for that as it was always going to be a one-off bonanza) at 60-100k per piece in a stack of 10 over about a week, then flipped it all back for 1m+ per piece post-patch. That felt pretty ebil, but I got over it - it's just a game after all - and high prices aren't always bad - you can sell at those prices as well as buy at them - and 1m is a popular equilibrium point for most rare salvages at high level (prices return to that level often).
But on the whole, no I don't feel ebil and I don't think other marketeers are ebil except perhaps the flippers who so dominate a niche that they force it into unnatural scarcity to boost prices (for their eventual flip), because they do noticeably inconvenience players. I don't think farmers are ebil either - they supply the market more than they draw from it, with a lot of stock it wouldn't otherwise have (especially redside, and especially purples when they're not in the AE), which more than balances their inflationary effects imho. I do think gold/inf sellers are evil because of their disruptive advertising, the mudflation they cause, and because they don't use the game for its intended purpose (having fun). But the really evil are still the rude players, the argumentative braggarts, the gankers and the griefers, of which this game has relatively few in my experience.
Your Steadfast Protection anecdote is a great lesson for those willing to learn. Take the time to look around and see what similar things cost. This is a lesson that would serve people very well in many different arenas of market interaction. It applies to all the following scenarios.
- Check item prices at all different levels for the item that will work as a purchase for personal use. Even 5 levels of difference is often a negligible difference in performance but can sometimes be massively cheaper.
- Almost always bid on recipes instead of already crafted items.
- Make sure to still check the price of already crafted items, because sometimes they are actually cheaper than the recipes due to market shifts or manipulations.
- Correlary: If you get a level 50 or other max-level item as a drop, see if you can't sell it (probably crafted) and buy a lower-level version for far less than you can sell the level capped one for.
- Be cognizant of level ranges for PvP zones, as they affect demand in nearby recipe level ranges.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
So I hit the 2 billion dollar mark about a week ago (of actual cash on hand). I could have hit it much sooner if I wasnt always trying to tweak my character and if I wasnt so busy with work and if I would have cancelled the dozen or so buy bids that I have out there).
As an aside, with the help of the evil bunny (Jo-Jo/smurphy) I was finally able to get a screenie. (It took me a bit longer to figure out how to get the GUI to come out in the screenie). Having said that, I havent quite explored how to post it these forums and so I lose points for no screenie.
(Hopefully I gain a few for taking the time to post my experiences).
Anyhow, the purpose of my post is not to prove that I am ebil but to relay some of my experiences (and feelings) on my way to getting 2 billion.
As an aside, I use to post on this forum a fair amount but lost my password some time ago and so for the past year or so I just come on here to read what others wrote. (The purple Bunny informed that my password is now the same as my game password and so I dont have to go try and get a new one).
Disclaimer: The things I am about to say, all of you already know. Its like I am preaching to the choir. Somewhat of a catch 22. The poor stay poor b/c they dont visit forums like these.
Anyhow:
(Long post)
First:
The ability to work the black market after AE came out is much easier than before AE. As many of you have noticed, there has not only been a proliferation of the one billionaire but of the two billionaires.
Therefore, I must tip my hat to those people who earned their billions before AE. People such the Bunny, DumpleBerry, (I suspect Cat, the Goat, SwellGuy, Uberguy etc, and others like him).
Those people are truly ebil.
Second:
There is no reason to be poor. Not after AE. (I dont know how i16 will impact things). I know everyone always says that but really its true.
All you have to do is to buy a recipe low, wait like a day or so, then flip it. In my case, I bought low, crafted it, then flipped it. But to be honest, I am not sure that crafting was even necessary. I just crafted out of habit.
And here is the thing. With AE, you have a lot of people who are the buy it nao people. So you dont have to study the market for hours on end. Not to reveal company secrets, but look if you just look at like a Level 50 Numina Heal. The price on that thing during a week goes from like 17 million to like 50 million (at least crafted). You dont have to be genius to figure out that buying that low and selling it high is easy money.
Third:
Related to the above. It took me a long time to actually start working the market. Sure, I was told to buy low and sell high but I didnt do that for the longest while. (Again, as I said, AE makes it so much easier). First, I started off with salvage. Then when I got some money going, I moved on to the big boys. I even dappled in purples for a bit (at which point I was sometimes turned over like 100 million). Bottom line: Money begets money. And you only need a small amount to start out.
Oh, an interesting note. During the last double xp weekend, I logged on with m sup-ed up Brute. Got on a few AE teams and earned infamy. However, it occurred to me that I could make money by just working the market. Understand what I am saying: I could earn more money in the market than on double xp/double infamy. And here is the real thing: I am not sure that I was earning more money in the market b/c of the nature of double xp/infamy weekend. I think I was earning more money in the market b/c its just plain faster (regardless of what is going on with double xp/infamy).
Fourth:
Can you corner the market? I might get flamed for what I am about to say (but this is only my opinion). In my opinion, while it may not be possible to corner the market for an extended time, I can say that an ebil (i.e. a billionaire) person can move the market for an extended time. Certainly for ebil fun (i.e.at a loss of money). But here is the thing. Even for profit.
Some of you may recall that about a month or so ago, Scientific Theories sold for 200K almost every single day for like weeks. Honestly, I think that was all my doing. (I say that b/c once I stopped, prices returned to like the 10k to 30K range and have stayed there).
The supply was low. (I also realized that AE ticket holders could not use their tickets to purchase a particular common salvageit was just random). So with AE driving people wild, you didnt have a bunch of players getting Scientific Theories in mission drops.
I just to put in bids of like 70 or 80 at a time. Some of the bids were designed to create a false image of demand. Others were put in there to make sure that if anyone came along and dropped an ST, it would go to me. I would then turn around and list those bad boys for 200K and they would sell.
Sometimes (though this often cost me more than it made me) I would even buy up every single one on the market so I would control it. (I even did this on Numina Heals but that didnt really pay off).
The money that I made on the ST cornering the market was not a whole lot as you are still only dealing with thousands and not millions but relative to the value of a non-manipulated ST, I made a lot of money.
Fifth:
Related to the above, IMO, flippers like myself probably served to drive the prices up. Stop. Dont flame me. Ive read dozens of posts which have explained why flippers dont drive prices up. However, its my feeling that the prices on certain particular recipes were the direct result (or at least in some part) related to my flipping. Plus: I know for a fact that others were doing it.
So let me rephrase. My individual flipping probably didnt much (except for the Scientific theories) but the collective flipping by many others probably drove prices up. As I said, I dont have any data to back the above up. Thats my feeling. And again, I go back to AE. Its my feeling that AE really changed the rules. That is, before AE, I dont think I could have cornered the market on an item. Post AE, with my billions, yes, I think I can. And for a profit.
Sixth:
Moral obligation. I feel no moral obligation or guilt at working the market for my gain. Is a stockbroker suppose to apologize for buying GMs stocks low and selling high?
However, I sometimes felt guilty for the following. Often when I bought stuff, I bought them like 8 at a time (especially when was pursing crafting badges). Well the last five bids may say: 4K, 5K, 4K, 5K, 6K. As my millions turned to hundreds, my patience for small fries grew less and less. I would put in 8 bids at 7K and only like 3 would get filled. I would then have to cancel the remaining 5 bids, and put 5 in at 8K. Then 2 would get filled. I would have to cancel the remaining and put in .You get the idea.
To avoid that, many times I would just say f-it. 8 bids at 15,555. Buy it nao. But then I would feel guilty b/c a poor person looking at the last five would see a wall of numbers showing 15,555 (or a new seller would see that and list at that or above).
Whereas in reality, the thing could probably have been gotten by the poor person for like 4K.
So I felt guilty in that respect. But at not at any of my intentional/focused market manipulations.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Sorry for the long post.