Mid-Level Recipe Shortage Trend?

I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing a trend here or if they think it's
just a short-term blip.

Since the release of I-16, it is looking like a lot of folks got out of the
AE, and back into the "real" worlds of Pargon City and Rogue Isles.

This has been (imho) beneficial in terms of salvage, which has reverted
(mostly) back to abundant supply and inexpensive prices. Rares have
returned to somewhat higher prices, like they used to be. Personally, I
think that is good, because, once again, common IO's are easily crafted
now, and in the cases where rare salvage is needed, it's typically still
worth the mildly increased price for it (ie. Set IO's).

The issue that I think I am seeing is a repeat of what occurred with merit
hoarding. Namely, supply of L50 set IO's is high, but recipes below that
level are scarce, or all too often, unavailable entirely, especially red-side.

I suspect the cause is the difficulty slider. I think it is a great incentive for
farming, which is why salvage has greatly improved, (yay), but unfortunately,
I think it also means that most of the supply is being produced by L50's,
reducing the quantity of recipes below that level.

I *am* somewhat surprised that the Halloween event hasn't upped the
mid-level recipe supply appreciably - I can't think of a reason that explains
that (except possibly that folks are just vendoring all of their drops to keep
focussed on ToT'ing <shrug>).

I'm also wondering if the player paradigm is now/(still?) this:
Level toons in AE to 50 - Farm/Equip toons through normal content @L50?

The questions I'd ask are:

1> Is anyone else seeing this trend too?

2> If so, What other factors do you think are contributing to it?

3> What ideas/suggestions could we propose to entice mid-level folks to
bring their set recipe drops to market?

I'd be interested in seeing your thoughts...


Regards,
4

I don't have solid data, but it does seem to me that recipes below 50 are scarcer than they have been.

Just based on my personal play and what I have observed others do:

Getting to level 10-12 is easy and quick enough without any powerleveling that I often do it just to get the feel of the character at low levels. It only takes a couple of hours.

After that, especially on heroes, I find the large distances, the same old maps and missions, and the lack of powers boring and tedious. So I will either dual box powerlevel myself, sit in with a friend, or do the occasional TF. And I tend to do that at least until the mid 30s to 40s.

I see and hear lots of other people getting their initial levels quickly as well. It's not everybody by any means. But a lot of the folks who power play and supply the market do it that way.

Also: Not enough goats grazing in DA.

The transition into and then back out of the AE has, I think, created a really dramatic swing in production paradigms. Before the AE, leveling was slower and what most people would call farming was more of a niche activity. You needed more matched teammates to SK, and it was before yet another XP rate bump in the early levels.

When the AE hit, pretty much anyone with an interest could generate lots and lots of Tickets, which acted like "pseudo merits" in the sense that you could use them to generate random things outside your native level range. This was used by lots and lots of people to roll things in ranges they didn't actually have characters in. Think about how many threads there were asking what level people rolled ticket rolls in, and what tier (Bronze, Silver, Gold) was best to roll in. They weren't even just restricted to this forum.

The first waves of changes curtailed the broad appeal of ticket farming, but still left the AE a strong PL tool. People still generated lots of tickets, but there seemed to be a shift away from that as a priority. If people capped tickets in their missions, I don't think most of them bothered to reset, because their main goal was XP. Market savvy players or just those with an interest in getting non-50 recipes likely continued to use their tickets to roll lower-level goods.

As for what's going on now, I think you hit on it - some of our highest-volume players have shifted to playing at 50, fighting large volumes of level 50+ mobs. Plent of other people are taking advantage of the SSK system to tag along, and so they too are getting only high-level drops. As a result of these factors, production of lower-level recipes via tickets has curtailed not only from the amazing highs of the AE ticket phase, but even from the more sedate period before the AE came out. (Hint - this is an opportunity for the market-minded player. The challenge here is that purples are probably better return on time inveted, so such players need to be willing to pass that up.)

Yup. I've seen this trend. In a post a little below this one, I detail how I frankenslotted a level 27 Kat/WP scrapper.

The hardest things to get for that build were the level 30 PBAoE Acc/Dmg and Acc/Dmg/End pieces. They required overnight bids and a premium in order to acquire them. The cost of those ballooned the price of the build significantly. Those 6 pieces alone added about 1M to a build that cost about 8M total. Everything else was dirt cheap, especially the salvage.

Well I am on redside and for the most part I am not out of AE but what seems to be my strategy certainly contributes to this.

I have been redside recently and what I have been doing is running the initial arcs, heading to PO getting papers running the banks, then heading into the AE till its time to get the next paper.

So far overwhelmingly I haven't been rolling recipes and with the advice people have been giving me I don't think I will till I am at 50. Salvage seems to have much better profit when you are at an odd level or low level and it seems to move quicker freeing up slots for use.

When my newest scrapper turned 32 I started looking into assembling her some Multi-Strike sets. They were scarce as hen's teeth in the 35-40 level range; with For Sale Only turned on, there were many, many gaps in the available recipes and crafted buttons.

I am lucky that I had been stockpiling some of the Kinetic Combats I slotted; she wants three sets of four. The supply has been fairly good, largely because I was willing to accept the Knockdown proc. Also, the zombie events dropping level 30 stuff may have impacted their availability. I did have to fill out the sets with direct merit purchases twice, though.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

I was feeling like this was just "2XP hangover, slamming into ToT madness" but now I'm starting to think there's a real change. A lot of it might be people making decisions based on the huge amount of money out there. Like "I'm not even going to sell it if it's less than a million" decisions. It seems like the 20K-50K stuff is now 100-150K, as mentioned by everyone else. I don't know if that's enough of a reward to get people to actually sell it, though. . . heck, the spread on expensive salvage was a million this morning. (something was "Buy for 1.5 million,sell for 2.5 million." ) People are throwing money at the wrong things. Maybe I should up my "minimum price paid for recipe" to 250K from 55K. It's the closest I can get to the currency loofah I really want.

To be honest, even in the AE era I never felt that there was a healthy supply of sub-level 50 recipes.

I use a lot of level 35 recipes in my build, and typically have to buy them with Merits (or offer money to others to do it for me).

Well, it's only anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be at least some shortage effects. My FF defender hit 50 during double XP, and the next day I placed a bunch of bids on low 30ish thunderstrikes to get his ranged defence up.

I noticed that there weren't really any existing stocks, so I placed bids (on a variety of level ranges) marginally above the 'last 5' to ensure I won and waited. I'm *still* waiting for some of them.

One thing I think everyone has been missing is the Power Leveling from ToTing in PI.

ToT generates tier 2 salvage but the pool A drops are from mob levels, which at the low end on a SSK'd ToT team will be level 49. There are no missions being completed from ToTing so Pool B is dropping in supply, PLing is replacing TFs and Oroing/story arcing to a degree so no merits are being cranked out either. Add the fact that they extended the Halloween event an other week and that accounts for at least some of the shortage.

Things should settle down again a couple weeks after the Halloween event ends.

I frequently slot my characters out with mid-30s IO sets and up as I level. This lack of lower level recipes has always been a syptom of the red-side anemic market. Ive had best luck red-side with working out a build and putting all my bids in a week or two before I need them. Thank goodness for SG storage bins. I do this so I can enjoy the benefits of IOs as I solo my way to 50. You do hit some snags in the road however. Ive had a bid out for a razzle dazzle triple for so long Ive started to talk to it whenever I log in that character. Its been there so long it remembers when the NY Giants were a good team....


With the new SSK system less Pool A recipes are being generated below 50 than ever before. Pool C/D are obviously taking a hit with the switch to merits over tickets....Could it be that ae was the best thing that ever happened to the market? I hope the devs dont realize this and lower the cap on merit hoarding forcing more people to spend them before 50.

I think the pool A "hollowing out" is going to get better shortly after the ToT frenzy ends. The Pool C "hollowing out" is going to go on for quite some time. Err, "rare recipes pool" or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

Who's for some level-frozen characters running TFs?

There's definitely a change. I put in some bids a week ago for some lvl 35 Mako's Bite recipes at somewhat higher than the going rate at the time, and none of them have filled. There have been very few sales during the week, and the prices have gone from the neighborhood of 1-2 million to 5-10 million on the few recipes that did get posted. So the supply is down, and the prices are climbing fast. I notice a similar result for lvl 35 Crushing Impact recipes today as well ... Very few recent sales, an the prices raising dramatically over the week for the few sales made. It's making it expensive to work on my 32 Scrapper, and her sets are badly in need of an upgrade (they are all lvl 20 sets right now). I also notice a dearth of recipes in the high 40s as well when trying to get some recipes for my lvl 45 Tank nothing I'm looking for for sale, and nothing having been sold in a long time. Several recipes I wanted no longer even had a history. I can't recall this being common ever before.

My frozen at 35 FF/Sonic is on Freedom. Where's your level-frozen character?

I have several level frozen toons, 1 level 30 on Protector and a couple on Justice.

3 level 37s on Justice and 1 level 44 on Justice.