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

The assumption that the system is somehow to blame for human nature, or that a system redesign will cure players of their impatience and lack of interest in the workings of the market is simply ignoring reality.

Low information BUY IT NAO customers are epidemic in any game market regardless of how much or how little information it provides. When I played WoW flipping was just as easy and profitable as it is here in spite of delivering all the sales history anyone could wish for. The exact same tricks worked in the exact same way.

People who value their game time over their play game money will always "overpay" for the stuff they want, regardless of what interface they're presented with.

No I don't believe that the system is to blame for human nature (I'd like to, because it's a depressing truth about human nature). However I would still like to see more information made available on sale prices. This wouldn't eliminate the BUY IT NAO buyers but it would make it easier for people who willing to wait but disinterested in tracking the market to get an idea of the overall sales price of an item.

As a side note, are you sure about WoW? I only played it for a short time and didn't do any real marketeering but I'm 99% sure it provided no information on sales history. The only advantage it had over CoH that i could see was that you could use a 3rd party mod to scan all auctions and make a record for you to track prices with.

As market tracking is an aspect of the mini-game I particularly enjoy, we'll have to agree to disagree. =P

It's been quite a while since I did any WoW, I could certainly be confused.
But I had access to all the data I could ever want, whether via their interface or some wildly popular add-on.

Fair enough, I tend to marketeer by the seat of my pants so more information would benefit me. Yes, I know it's bad but it works for me and I still make a profit despite regularly ending up with recipes where I can't remember how much I paid for them or what I intended to list the crafted IO for .

Do you really think that the only way to buy things in the real world makes it wildly apparent that one entity (or coalition of entities) is trying to corner it?

Yes, but that isn't "cornering the market". That's increasing the price. Someone who actually corners the market on something usually does so with the intention to increase the price, but not everyone who increases the price actually corners the market. This is true even if they manage to make a profit off the price increase. As the wikipedia/wiktionary quote says, "cornering" is about taking a position where you own enough of the stock of something that you can manipulate the price. In CoH, you manipulate the price just by virtue of bidding high. It doesn't actually matter how much of the inventory you buy - you just have to raise the floor, then get out at a higher price before the floor collapses or you buy too much to sell off higher.

Hey, whatever works!
The market, as I am fond of saying, is a very forgiving mistress.

Hyper I think you missed what I was replying to

100 million is the number that I was referring to not 10 million

Say that to some poor schlub who'd just accidentally added a few extra zeroes onto their bid...

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Just started playing myself not too long ago, under duress from friends, and I'm still a total newb. No, there wasn't good information directly from the game. But yes, it was an easy matter to get a third party add on to provide all the information I could ever need. So I was able to hop right in and start making gold hand over fist, and having probably at least as much fun with that as with the main game.

So yeah, even if it isn't in the game directly, the information is easily-accessible to new players that want it. That doesn't appear to change anything in regards to player behavior and how to make gobs of play money. I strongly suspect that even with a huge history, graphs, and almost anything you wanted to know, we'd still make influence the same way in City of Heroes that we always have. Perhaps margins would be lower. And it might be friendlier to a new marketeer. But overall, I think things would be pretty much the same.

Yep.
People who aren't interested in the process of the market won't suddenly become interested just because a bunch of bells & whistles are added to the marketplace.

That sort of access to information magnifies the PvP aspects by giving the people who do care more ammunition, but I don't think "the casual gamer" sees any kind of general benefit from it.