Trying to Adapt

Hello all, I am in need of some ebil help. I am trying to adapt to the increasing recipe costs due to the drop rate plummeting but I have notice that a lot of crafted enhancements are costing the same as uncrafted recipes. I am wondering how have you adjusted your sales in order to compensate for this lopsidedness...?

Due to the drop rate plummeting?

I am just leveling up lowbies in AE to get tickets and then I roll Bronzes until I get a valuable one and I sell it for mega bucks. I turned off xp at level 10 on the first one and 15 on another and am working on my one I will freeze at 20.

Nothing has changed about the drop rate, other than a lot of farmers moving back to PI and getting 'real' drops instead of tickets. From what they've said the drop rate bug has always been with us, so it's nothing new we just noticed it thanks to the changes in mission settings.


I haven't changed anything about my marketeering, other than laying off the purples while I wait for them to patch the bug.

The issue that I'm running into is that recipes are increasing in prices and crafted enhancements are not so profit margin is either very small i.e. 10k influence or there is none to be had.

I might have to go back to AE farming until this issue is resolved as I have barely recieved any recipes out of the numerous times I've gone farming in PI.

I took a quick look at a couple of my "old standards" (Numina level 50 healing for instance) and they still seemed to have a 5-10 million inf profit margin. This was heroside.

I've seen some niches become less profitable (but still profitable), but i16 has opened up new opportunities. I've done a terrific business in "second tier" recipes - harmonized healing, triage, serendity, ruin, focused smite. Profit margins aren't high, but they sell pretty well. Sweet spot seems to be level 30-35. Thunderstrikes, level 30-40, seem to sell out as fast as I list them.

This will probably change when the folks that are buying these finally get to level 50, but I've also noticed that people are not leveling at the insane rates that occurred with AE. Sure, there's still PL'ing but no more level 50s in 6-8 hours. So, bargain hunting for stuff you can frankenslot your character may be profitable for marketeers for quite some time.

Prices on most of the recipes that I normally buy have gone up, but in many cases so has the sale price of the crafted IO, because there are fewer being sold.

Specific examples: Mako's Bite and Scirrocco's Dervish IOs. I used to be able to buy most of these recipes for 5,000 or 10,000 a piece. Now in most cases that's not possible, and I'm spending maybe 300,000 or 500,000 per recipe. Price is partly offset by cheaper salvage, of course. For the more useful IOs (damage/recharge, accuracy/damage) there are fewer being sold and where I might have sold for 3-4 million in the past, they may be going for 5-6 million or even 8-10 million now, depending on how limited the supply is.

In cases where recent prices have been as much as 10 million, and there are very few for sale (say, 10-15), I raise my sale price accordingly. ^_^

(I admit, it may take longer for them to sell, due to my price or just lower turnover. But I'm not losing money.)

I know there are probably IOs like you describe that the price of the recipe and the sell price of the IO are too close to make a profit (at least, within a reasonable wait time) but that's hardly true for all IO recipes.

Apparently it's going live on Wednesday.

Yes, even without carefully looking over everything, I have seen a few items where the crafted IO sells for exactly the same as the recipe or the recipe costs millions MORE than the crafted IO...which I don't get. I'm trying to think of the names of the recipes...something in the Analyze Weakness set, maybe?

It's weird, and it could be caused by someone having a fit of frustration and paying some gigantic price for one or a few recipes, or it could be some new trend I haven't caught on to.

This sort of thing happens from time to time. I think the most common cause is because the rate of transactions in the recipe and crafted items do not match. Usually, the rate of transaction is higher in the recipes. When there is a price shift in recipes, it takes a while for that to propagate into the crafted item. Because the "last 5" produces a kind of price inertia (people tend to both list and bid based on it), sometimes the crafted item's price will even ride out a temporary surge or decline in recipe price.

Yep. The whole thing will oscillate in kind of oddly shaped patterns of price difference, cycling back and forth between those initial and end states. That would be in the absence of any other influences, of course, which means it won't really do that. But it will may tend towards that.

I'm not even sure it's that rational. I've been able to bid on a block of ten salvage items at 1 inf and place a block of ten of the same item up for sale at 10,000 inf at the same time. Then I sat back and watched as every few minutes I bought one for 1 and every few minutes or tens of minutes someone bought one of mine for 50,000 or 100,000 -- five to ten times the inflated price I'd set for myself (which was itself marked up ten thousand times the price I'd paid).

Any one of my sales could have been had for 1/5 to 1/10 the price just by bidding carefully, and anyone willing to let a bid sit could have trumped my 1-bids by bidding, well, two inf. Instead they pay fifty thousand times what they have to.

Man, I wish real life worked like that.