Leveling the playing field

The fastest and most effective ways for the Devs to cap market prices woudl be so easy to impliment that if they were unhappy with market prices as they stand (and that position could change at any time) they would have done it already. There are already three insanely effective ways to cap market prices in the game:

1. Stores - Sell the recipes for a "market cap price." They would always be avaliable at that price, meaning no one in their right mind would buy one from the markets for more than that.

2. Merits - Sell the recipes via merits. The supply would go up and it would give an alternate method of aquisition, meaning lower demand on the markets and higher supply, especially if the merit price was set low (think 200 merits or less). This is less effective than selling them outright in stores, but still effective. I know many people who haven't bought a "100 Million Inf IO" from the markets since merits were introduced except for purples.

3. Tickets. Same as merits, except they would have to remove the randomized selection tickets are currently locked into, but that's a fairly simple change. Again, if ticket prices were set insanely low (think 2,000 or less for purples), the ability to quickly acquire them without marketing woes would lower demand and boost supply.

With just those three in mind, it's easy to see that shou'd the Devs ever decide "the market is just out of control" they can quickly slam the door on it in a variety of insanely effective ways (and that's ignoring just bumping up drop rates by a few percent) using one or all of the methods. Because the Devs can conjure these high-demand/high-price items out of thin air at will, If they wanted to put regulation into the markets, they already have the tools to do so, since they have not, they don't view it as a problem or at least not a large enough problem to do anything with at the moment.

When Issue 9 came out and introduced the market, I had 8 million influence. Nowadays I have something like 10-12 billion in liquid assets and probably around 6-8 billion worth of IOs on my toons.

I can make influence very easily by buying some recipes and salvage and then selling the crafted IO for 2x-10x what I paid to make it.

There is no reason you can't do the same. Even an hour a week spent focused on using the market can earn you exponentially more than what you may be making now through regular play.

It's called a Free Market. Of course prices are high; it's easier than working for them.

They could fix alot of the huge pricing issues if Bids would cancel after 24 hours. I believe it use to be 48 hours at one time although I may be wrong. Bids should also cancel on unsubscribed / unpaid accounts.

Finally I'd like to see a new stat added to the auction window that displays how many accounts are bidding on said item. I want to know if that 1000+ bids is alot of accounts or someone low ball bidding / flipping with all of there auction slots. This would help me decide whether or not to list something for a higher price.

Didn't we just get done with this topic?

I don't think farming is the way to riches, I PL'd a bit this morning and my 50 made prob 10-15 million. During that same time 3 of my flips sold, netting me over 100 million on the same toon.

I could farm 24/7 and still make an order of magnitude less than what a bit of marketeering would net.

Play the market, buy what you want for your build, price caps aren't the solution.

Ok, At this point i'm sorry I said ANYTHING! I would make a full retraction if possible. I still stand that the drops are far too lacking on several key enhancements that I am looking for and the 40 - 50 mil pricetags are completely outrageous. But you people and your inane replys that border on harassment really take the cake.

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A better alternative to adding in a cap that could get you an entire purple set from one ITF would be to slightly (ever so slightly) increasing the drop rates of PvP and Purple Recepies. That way you would be more likely to get them and the buying prices would slowly reduce and they because more readily avaliable. See the truth is if something is in demand then the price ramps up untill there is enough of it for everyone. Gold is a good example of this, because it's so pure there is a very limited supply so shares in the gold market just keep getting more expencive. If you bought some shares in the gold market a few decades ago, now they would be worth well over 10x as much as they are worth now. so if you bought a purple recepie a few issues ago for 10mill, you could sell it now for arround 100mill or so.

Another alternative would be to increase the total ammount of recipies and salvage you can hold, as this way you will avaliable to the random drops more often as you cannot get a drop when your inventory is full so you have a 0% change to get the recipy you want whereas you might have a 5% chance if you did have space. and also any other recpies you don't want can be sold for inf when it gets full. i think max 50 recipies and max 100 salvage is a reasonable maximum for a cap, but not necessarily what the cap shoudl be =)