Returning from hiatus: I dun unnerstand teh marketz no moar!

If the crafter is sucking up all the recipes, all the consumer has to do is bid exactly one more inf than the crafter to get the next recipe that comes along. In fact, since it's presumably worthwhile to the crafter and they aren't making big bucks on a one inf margin, buy two recipes and craft one to sell.

Unless there's only one recipe a week showing up at all, of course, but in that case it's still going to take the same time whether a crafter is working the niche or not. And one inf will still outbid them.

I don't believe that's true. Or more accurately, I think it's self-correcting.

If demand drops to the point that it's not worth selling certain things on the market, then certain things will cease to be sold on the market. Which will create a shortage. Which will create demand. Which will lead to the supply rising to meet that demand.

Overall, yes, market prices will be lower. You won't make 10 million on a sale quite so often. But the other side of that you're ignoring is that you won't NEED 10 mil on a sale anymore. Inflation will have been brought under control. Less inflation means more free spending. More free spending means a stronger economy. You may make less INF on the market, but your buying power per INF just increased alot.

Ultra-rares will still fetch a premium price well above everything else in the market, but they're luxury items.

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

Except it's never a monopoly. Setting a price floor is not a monopoly. A monopoly is when you are the sole supplier of a good. Setting a price floor means you're trying to out bid everyone else who wants to buy something. Not only does this not guarantee that you're the only buyer for all goods, it doesn't guarantee that you're the sole seller at whatever price you choose to sell.

Nearly every "real world" version of cornering a market relies on buying up the stock of something that, while perhaps not finite in supply, has supply that is heavily "bursty". For example, buying up some crop commodities, the buyer can be fairly certain that no significant new supply can be produced locally after the fall harvest. Only the most low-supply goods in CoH are like that - typically certain low-level recipes that see little exposure as popular random roll ranges. When operating in these ranges, the person cornering the market is simply setting a high competitive price bid - they can't actually ensure they buy everything.

Essentially I consider the examples we have a misuse of the phrase "corner the market".

No
From the wiktionary: Only online definition I could find

In finance, to corner the market is to purchase enough of a particular stock, commodity, or other asset to allow the price to be manipulated, by analogy to the general business jargon where a company described as having "cornered the market" has a very high market share. The cornerer hopes to gain control of enough of the supply of the commodity to be able to set the price for it.


In the games case cornering a market usually consists of trying to grab the flow of an under priced good.

LOL, when wrong accuse the messenger and assert louder.

Anyway above is a definition of corner you might want to read it so you can at least use the correct terminology. Corner <> Monopoly

That same definition is on Wikipedia, verbatim, and I read it before I posted.

In CoH, you can only control the part of the inventory which you buy, and you can only by the part of the supply for which you outbid others. If the ongoing supply of the item is sold below your sale price, or if others buy above your purchase point, you achieve neither.

Edit: To try and be more clear... In the more "real world" examples, the price goes up because the parties who corner the market for a good establish sufficient control the good's supply. In CoH, the price goes up because the parties who "corner" the market are bidding higher, and thus increasing the price which others must bid to win against them. A significant part of the price manipulation comes from the increased price floor, and not specifically from the control of inventory. People have to pay more to outbid you, not specifically so they can buy the goods you have in stock (at a price you set).

I still consider it a misuse of the term.

You equated them in one of your posts. In fact, I quoted you on it in my 2nd post before this one.

YESSSSNO

The monopoly I was referring to was the cheap easily available items.

There are any number of things on the market where someone has listed something at far above the going rate and just let it sit. You don't need to have a monopoly on the item to have removed the reasonably priced items from the market.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I was certain it was given the context.


Edit: And just to be clear the fact that people can come in and provide supply at higher prices or you fail to get the whole supply doesn't matter. You have shifted things so someone who wants to IO up a character they are playing either has to put in bids and wait , buy crafted or bid a prohibitive amount for the recipe or salvage.

The would be COH corner has advantages that come from imperfect information and lack of transparency. You can't come into a market and annnounce, "I am willing to buy all magnesium offered at $X per pound" without making people wonder, "What's he wanting all that magnesium for?"

The COH player doesn't have the information that a tradable commodity player would have. Confronted with a series of five past sales, they cannot know whether that price is a flipper's standing buy order or a flipper's resale price. He may think his valuable is junk; he may think his junk is worth quite a bit. He cannot know whether there's a customary and established going rate; he cannot tell who is buying and selling. This lack of information makes the market minigame possible.

Not sure how the quirks of the interface go from an advantage in paragraph one to a crippling disability in paragraph 2.

The same information is available to everyone, the playing field is level as can be.

Absent control of supply (or as Uber notes, supply that follows a predictable pattern) there is no "cornering" possible.

You will note that one talks about "players" who are at a disadvantage, while the advantage lies in favor of "the would-be corner".

We're all players.

What's your point?

People who pay attention being able to get things cheaper and sell them dearer than those who don't isn't "cornering" anything.

That would be an extremely bad idea for a number of reasons. First a lot of people store excess Inf by bidding on items that don't actually exist (i.e. level 53 IOs) so the devs would need to introduce items that have not previously existed to fulfill these bids. Secondly there are people who place very low bids on high ticket items just in case (or because they stopped playing the character and then the price of the item increased) so we'd get a large spike in the supply high ticket items (especially PvP IOs).

The other big thing I have noticed is that supply of recipes that cap out at 40 have nearly dried up (Touch of Death I'm looking at you). These seem to be coming into the market slower - a combination of things I imagine, but not sure I can put my finger on it.

Well part of it's going to be that although bosses can drop C/D recipes most of the ones generated that way will be level 50s. However I suspect that it's also being caused by people who roll merits opting to roll in the 46-50 range. People who frequent the market forum will mostly be aware that the 35-39 range is a better bet due to several popular recipes that cap out at 35 or 40 (Kinetic Combat, Touch of Death and Miracle being the primary examples). However if you don't really follow the market you might not realize this and therefore choose to roll 46-50 believing that's where the good stuff is.

most of the supply is at 50 because that's where the farmers are, and supply at lower levels has been diminished by all of the increases in levelling speed we've gotten over the last while.

Plus the way tickets & merits work creates "clusters" at certain levels.
The amount of action and the generally higher prices at level 50 provide an incentive to generate recipes at the upper end of the level range.

Incorrect. I have a MM who had XP turned off at L10 with approximately 14 WG's. 5 of them went for in excess of 10 million inf. 6 more went in excess of 8 million inf. The remainder sold for in excess of 6 million inf.

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Well that mostly comes down to the fact that level 10s were cheap enough that there was no real need to shop around at the higher levels (thanks by the way, I was way to lazy to get my own). But yeah I don't think they ever got above 10mil.

OK, you both did a good job capturing what was unformed in my head. I "knew" level 50 recipes seemed to be in stable supply, but couldn't put my finger on why. Probably because I always roll in the 30-34 or 35-39 range.

thanks.

You're either ignoring some important factors, or have a different definition of level playing field than I have. In general, lack of transparency, obtuse cycles, complex feedback, difficult interfaces, and similar factors give strong advantages to manipulators over occasional consumers.

In the real world, commodities traded on exchanges are usually bought by professional buyers, who regularly purchase the same or similar products. They have the means and incentive to spend time and effort developing the same sort of models and market understanding that the sellers do, and it's comparatively balanced. In contrast, the CoH buyer is far more frequently a one-off purchaser, or a small quantity; many of the most valuable items are limited to only 1 or 5 mechanically, and have additional practical limitations.

A market manipulator or market profiteer can focus on a limited number of items / niches, and it is both useful and practical for them to develop a detailed understanding of how those niches work over time. A purchaser looking to outfit a character is by contrast shopping over a wide variety of items, and given the general opacity of the CoH markets, even given the same amount of time (which is unlikely) will have it spread far thinner.

So while the same information is *theoretically* available to everyone, in practical terms due to the extremely limited amount visible at any given time it is only *practically* available to those who have both a fair amount of time and a good distribution of it; and there's a strong bias in favor of depth vs. breadth.

As a comparison: when I was active in the crafting and markets in FF-XI, the in-game info listed the last 10 sales, with price, date, time, seller, and buyer. An external website kept track of the last 25 sales in full detail, and at least the last 100 sale prices. Handy graphs displayed trends, there were links to related items and information about how the items were made or sourced, and useful basic statistical info was right there (min, max, average, last price; typical volume per day; average pricing trends over several intervals; cross-market comparisons; etc.) In this setting, it really was a level playing field; a first-time buyer who had never looked at the market for an item could have a respectable understanding of the mechanics and flow in a few clicks and a minute or so. Looked at in this sort of light, the workings of the CoH market is dramatically more opaque.

I roll tickets in 35-39 range hoping for the big strike, but I generate far fewer merits, so those I roll at 50.

Glad to be of service!

there's nothing complex or difficult about our market, and the lack of transparency was a design choice.

The myth of "teh eeebil manipulator" preying on "the innocent casual gamer" is dumber than a zombie and harder to kill.

Ah, but there is nothing stopping anyone from becoming a marketeer. So even if the current information is limited there's nothing to stop someone from spending the time to track it. Marketeers choose to track it because we like Inf, other players choose not to because they value time to do other activities higher.

However I agree with you that an overhaul to the market interface to make time based information more readily available would be very good (i.e. let me see the last 24 hours sales, or the last week, or the last months if I want to). I don't think it would eliminate marketeering as a profitable pursuit since it relies at least as much on impatience and laziness as it does the opaqueness of the market. I'll admit it would probably decrease profits on some activities (especially flipping salvage).

The fact that CoH uses a double blind market makes it very friendly to more casual players since you can get deals without needing to spend time camping the market. However it does have a steep learning curve and a better availability of information would make it easier to traverse the curve.

Reread what I said "in excess of 10 million". The highest priced one I can remember went for 18 million. Mostly because it was so out-of-line with the rest of my sales.

That Mastermind essentially funded the rest of my villaingroup.

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