Missing the point !

Just checked WW. Oblits at 35 are 0 for sale and up to 38mil uncrafted. Tha'ts about 4 times what they were. Level 50's are hovering between 10-30mil.

Posi's are decent.
Imperv's are up to 30mil on 3 pieces.
Kin Com are up to 60 mil on a couple pieces. (which is half of what you need)
Numina's are up to 40 mil on 3 pieces. (half of them aren't avail at 35)
LotG are all over the place on 35 and 50's. (cept for 7.5)

So, compared to the low 10's of mil that we used to pay, yes they are up quite a bit. Maybe you're the one that hasn't been around long enough to know what the prices use to be. These again were UNcrafted.

Kin Com's crafted are up to 100mil on 2 pieces atm. Im looking.
Imperv Armor are ave of 40mil
Numinas are ave around 40-50mil

Those are at 50. So, yes, i do know what i'm talking about. I've paid as little as under 10mil per for these before whatever is causing the increases. So, please tell me again how the prices are going down. Or shall i buy u a new compass?

I picked up a level 49 PvP recipe for 40 million (no sales history, so I lowballed it and won) and re-listed it for 75 million. It sat for a LONG time, only because it wasn't level 50. I just left it alone and it sold for 80 million or so.

In my experience, anything players genuinely want that isn't tremendously common will eventually sell, whatever ridiculous price you assign it. Patience is a two way street.

Bingo!

Level 50? Two of those recipes don't go up to lvl 50, so that kind of blows your argument about knowing what you're talking about.

First off, you're not disaggregating the various recipes in each set. Second, many of the prices have gone down, according to your numbers above.

Some Posi's Blasts (the pool B's) will go for 100k or so recipe. The Posi pool C's (the triple and the proc) have dropped in price at most ranges; they used to cost over 10 million. That price has gone down.

Level 50 Obliterations (you don't say which ones) hovering at 10-30 million? The pool C's (quad and proc) used to sell at lvl 50, uncrafted typically for 40 million, sometimes skyrocketing up over 100 million. At one point, people made the argument that the "big 3" C's, LotG, Numina and Miracle uniques, had become the "big 4" including the Oblit quad. That price has gone down. The B's (D/R, A/D/R) have definitely gone up in price in the middling levels.

My first pool C Impervium armors I ever sold--level 40s--both went for 40 million, as recipes. According to you, they're now 30 million. That price has gone down.

There are many prices that have gone up; more than have gone down. There is inflation in the game. You're just rather unobservant about which prices are inflating.

And if you're gonna complain about lack of recipes in the middling levels, then stop powerleveling your toons on a 50 map. You're part of that problem.

I know some stop at 35 and 40. der. I can get level 35 recipes cause i stopped a toon at 35 for AE rolls. I'm not part of the problem when i sell my drops for 222. ALL of them. Do you? I don't even use 35 recipes but that don't mean others don't. (cept for kin com)

So you missed the part where Donna was told that it probably wouldn't work because no single person could completely cut off supply for most items, and would inevitably get undercut by other people who do things like post their items for 222 and allow the lowballers to get what they want for less than the going rate?

Or did you just choose to ignore it?

The fact that people can come up with plans for how to make inf or corner the market does not mean they will work. Most such plans, if you've followed the market forums at all, result in a loss of inf.

I think you've demonstrated quite a bit of imagination in this thread, yes.

Oh ok. Sorry. I'm sure she's the only one who thought of it or does it. And with only a few pieces to even buy, i'm sure it's really hard to do. It's good that you let me know that. Thanks.

I've played the market since it came out, I've check it almost every single day since issue 9. I know full well prices have been raised in the long term. When I started out in issue 9 ( I've been around since about July 04 but the market was issue 9), I had 8 million influence. I've been a flipper and a crafter the whole time, though I mostly do crafting. I have around 18-20 billion on hand and about that much in IOs on my toons.

The most expensive stuff used to cost 40-50 million ( for lotgs and numinas). Now they run from 60-200 million. Yes, in the long term prices have risen. Fulmens already explained why that happened - people can now create more influence per hour than they used to. The market does not create influence, defeating mobs and selling to vendors does.

Rare salvage used to run 3-5 million for most arcane pieces and 800k-2 million for tech pieces. Now a days they run 800k-2 million for almost all rare salvage. ( By rare salvage I strictly am refering to the level 30+ range that gets heavily used in most mid to high level IOs). What happened ? The price normalized over time with various spikes and dips due to AE coming out. The prices crashed when AE came out because everyone was farming tickets with no per mission cap. Everyone had tons of tickets to gobble up rare salvage - thus there was an abundance of supply at a lower cost than the old 3-5 million mark. Now that people are back to doing various in game things as opposed to being heavily into AE farming, the prices have reached a stable value.

Purples started out in the 30 million range and stayed below 75 million for a long time. Once AE hit, the amount of influence being created skyrocketed. Suddenly people had alot more to spend on these very rare and low supply items. Suddenly people had alot more PLAY MONEY to spend. Because so many people now had ALOT MORE PLAY MONEY they started bidding MORE on these RARE AND SHINY items. Because people started bidding higher, items listed at the old 30-75 million range all sold out and now when people go and see what the items are normally selling at they see the new price that people are willing to pay. Because there is low supply on these VERY RARE AND SHINY items people can infact behave the way you suggest ON THESE VERY RARE AND SHINY items ONLY. This means there are less possible flippers to help lower prices by listing lower due to lack of supply. If the people who would list lower CANT GET THE ITEM OFTEN ENOUGH they can't lower prices by listing lower.

I've made lots of influence on the very sets you listed ( Posi blast, ToD , Obliteration, Kin Combat and Impervium Armor). I can tell you that these sets vary WILDLY over time. One month a piece may sell at 20 million, next month it sells for 5 and the month after that 12. Because they vary so much, they also have spikes in price. Some pieces go up around 100 million, but they fall back down to the 20-50 million mark over a few months.

The original post in this thread was a question - you cannot use a question , an unproven hypothesis to say you have proven your point about market manipulation.

People in this thread responded to the original question with a negative response. This kind of thinking, on most items in the market, DOES NOT WORK. Why ? We have all explained that to you a dozen times - two people selling the same thing are competing for buyers. One person MUST LIST LOWER to CONSISTENTLY get the sale.

This method of competition fails if supply is too low. If supply is low then multiple people can't compete due to not everyone having something to sell. If a buyer HAS to buy from a small amount of potential sellers then at that point they do not have a choice but to pay a higher price. This effects pvp IOs, purples and respec recipes. All other recipes have enough supply to support flippers helping to manage the price. ( addendum - this is only true of all recipes at particular level ranges, oddball levels have a lack of supply problem due to the way the developers have implemented various drop systems).

Now that we've covered the argument point by point, it's time for a lesson on how flipping and crafting effect the price of an IO in the blueside market ( because redside has a horrendous lack of supply). We will first define a few types of players that may be involved.

Player A is a patient buyer - this player will wait for a bid to fill up to a month or more if need be in order to get the IO at the price they want.

Player B is a buy it nao buyer - this player wants everything ASAP and will pay what ever they need to pay to get it ASAP.

Player C is a flipper - this player will list low bids on a crafted IO/recipe and sell the crafted IO/recipe at a higher price than what they paid for it. This kind of player will not craft the recipe, but instead sell the recipe itself at a higher price.

Player D is a crafter - this player will buy recipes and salvage and then sell crafted IOs at a price higher than what it cost to make the IO.

Player E is an evil market manipulator - this player will attempt to sell items at higher than previous 'normal' values in order to make a profit. This kind of player will do things like : buy up all the current supply of an IO/recipe, manipulate the last 5 sold lists, list well above current 'normal' rates.

Players C and D understand that you have to list lower to get more sales so they will not list at the going rate or higher. Instead they will list the items for some price lower than the going rate but higher than what they got it for.

Now that we have defined the players lets give them are field to play on : Pounding Slugfest: Chance for Disorient level 30. This recipe changes price wildly.

Player A wants to slot this in his power. Player A looks and sees that the crafted IO is currently going at 30 million (CURRENTLY GOING). Player A goes and checks the cost of the recipe : 75,00 influence but 0 for sale. Player A puts in a bid at 75,00 and does not look back at it for a week.

Player B wants to slot this in his power. Player b looks and sees that the crafted IO is currently going at 30 million. Player B bids 31 million and buys the IO.

Player C wants to sell this recipe or IO. Player C looks and sees the IO is currently going at 75k for a recipe and 30 million crafted. Player C comes back a week later and now sees the recipes are selling at 2 million and the crafted IO is selling at 13 million. Player C now bids 80k each on 30 recipes and 7 million each on 5 of the crafted IO. Player C comes back a few days later and relists the recipes at 500k each and the IOs at 10 million each.

Player D wants to sell this crafted IO. Player D looks and sees that the crafted IO is currently going at 30 million. Player D comes back a week later and now sees the recipes are selling at 2 million and the crafted IO is selling at 13 million. Player D bids 500k on 10 recipes and comes back a few days later, buys the salvage, crafts the IOs. Now player D knows it cost him 3 million influence to craft the IO AND player D ALSO knows the IO has sold from 13-30 million in previous weeks. Player D decides to list the IO for 8.5 million in an attempt to undercut the other people getting the 13 million influence sales.

Player E wants to sell the crafted IO and make as much as possible doing it. Player D looks and sees the crafted IO is selling at 13 million and the recipe is selling at 50k. Player D then bids 75K on 50 recipes. Player D also buys all the currently available recipes and crafted IOs. Player D comes back a few days later, crafts the IOs and relists them all at 26 million (twice the going rate).

In this situation player E has caused a temporary shortage of supply and a spike in the perceived going rate. Player E is the evil market manipulator that is trying to cause prices to go up in order to make even more profit. Players A,C and D all know that the IO varies in price because they watched it over more than one week's time. Those 3 kinds of players will not buy at player E's prices because they know they can wait longer and get it cheaper because supply on that recipe / IO is high enough to support competition. Player B doesn't care because now he has the IO he wanted. After about a week, Player E will be stuck with 20-60 IOs that are not going to sell very fast because players C and D have both started buying recipes higher than player E did and they are selling lower than player E does.

Because supply is sufficiently high for this IO, player E cannot manipulate it very long without failing.

If this were instead of pvp IO, the supply is much lower and now Player E has bought up much more then the normal level of supply for that IO, so much so that player C and D could not get any. At this point player E is the only person that has any of that IO to list for sale and players A and B both have no choice but to pay player E's prices because players C and D cannot sell items they don't have.

BS, chief, total BS. History has NOT shown us this. What history has shown us is that the prices tend to go up and up because there is a massive flow of influence into the game. But feel free to make up more fanciful explanations and claim that this is what 'history' has shown us.

It *IS* your imagination.
The prices are driven by supply and demand, not some sinister cabal or random packs of greedy pigs.


And, once again, you retreat to your standard fallback position: anyone who disagrees with you must be one of the greedy pigs who's messing up the market. How predictable.


Wait, what's that? Anyone who disagrees with you must want a 'broken' market? Deja vu!

You continue to demonstrate your ignorance. We all saw that post. We see posts like that all the time. And they always get the same response: "It won't work. You'll probably lose a lot of cash."
If you've been playing even the SLIGHTEST attention to this forum section, you would know this to be true.


Yeah, give it a try, why don't you?

Yes, really. Really. Every last time you post on this topic, you do so in a self-aggrandizing fashion that bespeaks you as a lily-white paladin, a rent in this universe into a beautiful financial utopia where everyone can buy everything they want for only 1 inf, torn in the side of this universe in the shape of a man, a samite-clad saint of perfection and wonder who, possessed of nothing but the purest of intentions to improve things for the Casual Player Unicorn Grifferbeast, stand up high on your moral high ground and throw very big clods of dirt upon the malificent hordes of conspiring, huddling, prating mass of marketeers, sustaining their conspiracy in the perfect silence that perpetuates an eternal rise in prices, explaining why every thing on the market is now worth 2 billion inf. Somehow, this conspiracy maintains its stranglehold despite the safeguards the market has in place to do so, your factually incorrect statements are merely proof of how right you are, and our pointing it out is evidence of how we fear and tremble at the sight of your towering, gorgeous crusader, the knight templar that stands before the innocent Pheldagryffs who just want to purple their warshades out.

The fact is, if anyone was running a conspiracy, certainly a successful one, anyone at all, do you think that it'd be something that could be actually noticed by someone as ignorant as you? On second thoughts, don't answer that, as you're well aware, no marketeer can read your words directly without passing them through an interpreter, who, as we know, dies of exposure to the Perfect Truth of Saint Eryq.

For those who wish to consider this argumentum ad hominem, remember that such an argument is an accordance of cart-horse ordering: "You're an idiot, therefore you're wrong," is a different creature to "You're wrong, therefore you're an idiot."

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I concur.

You really are living in your own little world.

So you can sit on your high horse and call others names but when you start others can't?

You have one, consistent message in all your ranting here that Talen_Lee points out nicely; you think you are more virtuous, smarter and a better human being than people that would try and make a profit in the games market.

I have a friend that has a martyr complex like that. He has my sympathy as well.

You have a secondary message that seems to be something like "Some items on the market can be manipulated in price sometimes, therefore the entire market is being constantly manipulated all the time."

This secondary message has been dis-proven over and over here, as well as within the market itself. Therefore you fall back to your primary message repeatedly.

If your message was ""Some items on the market can be manipulated in price sometimes and I think it's wrong to do that" you might have gotten a different reaction, but probably not because of the holier than thou attitude you lace your posts with at every turn.

Personally I have made all of the inf to outfit my characters by following the oh-so-virtuous trio of rules you laid out:

Do I get to be a saint now as well? Saint Juba has a nice ring to it!

I just love it when people who think they are better than others try to show everyone the one true path. It provides me with quite a bit of entertainment.

Thanks again for making me smile. Keep on posting, please, I love to read this kind of thing over coffee in the morning for a good laugh to start the day.

No they're "up in arms" because you've been told repeatedly that (and why) it makes little difference and that (and why) other factors are much more important.

Please, please stop and think, READ the responses you've been getting from the people here who understand economics better than you do and who have very kindly and gently been trying to clue you in (ok you've been flamed a bit, but I'm guessing you are used to the internets by now ).

Economics has often been called "counter-intuitive". Once you learn it, it's actually quite simple (provided you can think logically), but you do have to sit down and make the effort to LEARN it, because it goes against the grain somewhat. Because of our ingrained intuitions, even trained economists can sometimes fall for fallacies like the idea of a "reasonable/just price", if they're subtly disguised.

Our brains evolved in our ancestral environment as hunter-gatherers, with small bands of people we know pretty well, with very basic economies, without innovation, large scale production or division of labour, so a lot of our economic intuitions (what "feels" or "seems" right to us, economically) while right for THOSE kinds of circumstances, are flat out WRONG if we try and apply them to MODERN circumstances (i.e. with vast numbers of strangers interacting, with division of labour, mass production, innovation, etc.). The in-game economy has some of those features of a real large-scale economy, enough for someone who understands economics to understand the in-game economy.

It took some incredibly smart people several hundred years since Adam Smith (who was the first to really break the back of the problem) to really get the understanding of economics complete and correct, so it's no shame if it takes a while for little ol' you or me to get it; but it does take some effort before the voice of reason overrides the voice of intuition. Slow down, re-read what people have been saying a few times, and think about it.

Do you even read our replies? I told you in this thread that have 10s of billions of inf, richly IO'd characters, and I have done it while doing none of those three things. I told you that, but you either failed to read it, or you refuse to accept or believe it.

Oh, and you forgot one, in my opinion.

ex 4) farming

I don't do that to any meaningful level, while you've made it sound like it's a pretty full-time engagement for you.

Why do you take all my posts personally? When i say "people" im not saying ONLY UBER DOES THIS. Yes, i do farm everyday to afford the nicer things in WW and to get rare drops to sell or slot. The thing that you, sir, are missing is that PEOPLE DO, do those things i've said. Do you read all of my posts or pick out stuff to just whine about? So, please keep flaming me and not the ones posting about screwing up WW. Later Gator.

It's not 'my' truth. The rest of us are discussing REALITY. If you disagree with actual facts then, by definition, yes, you must be wrong.


It tickles us that you're still posting from fantasyland. We're trying to explain how the market works so new players can understand it better. If new players listen to you, and think that it's all manipulated and unfair, they will be disillusioned with the market (and the game). I would prefer that not to happen as a result of your delusional postings.


Once again, your "guess" is wrong. We're 'up in arms', as you call it, because the vast majority of what you've posted is flat-out false.
Yes, prices can be manipulated SHORT-TERM. As a reliable method of earning cash, however, it does not work.


Right, you never actually 'said' that you're better, but you take every possible opportunity to explain how you're sticking up for the little guy. Here's a clue: if you were really about altruism, you wouldn't be in here bragging about it. In your mind, it's all about YOU.

I'm not taking your posts personally. The problem is that you're claiming that the only people making money around here are (a) flippers and (b) farmers like yourself. It's a foundation of your argument, and I'm evidence that it's not true. I'm pointing out how I'm different not because I feel personally affronted by your posts, but because it undercuts your broad generalized claims about the market, and how it's only usable by people who are willing to flip goods.