Are we that hated?

Fair enough.


No problem. Not going to ask you to give away your niche(s).


The thing is, there's ALWAYS going to be someone who thinks the price is "too high" or doesn't like using the market. I'm really not sure what, if anything can be done to "solve" a problem that's essentially insoluble.


It still all comes down the the problem being impatient buyers and their perception of "need".

I can't control what other people think (though things would be a damn sight easier for me if I could).

And, the minute you have a difference of opinion, someone is eventually going to be dissatisfied (and blame the other person).

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I am not convinced. My answer to the salvage issue is to run a personal SG base for storage, and buy in (or ticket-roll) salvage only when I need it. With nine racks of common salvage, I could accomodate 7 1/2 of each salvage item; I always sell what I have most of, so if I am not playing exclusively in one tier and crafting in another, I approach something like that situation.

I've only ever found myself buying or rolling more than a very small quantity of salvage when doing Invention badges - and that doesn't represent a net shortfall of production over consumption, it just means that if I expect on average to have 7 1/2 Masterwork Weapons and go for a badge that needs 8-9, it's obvious that I don't necessarily have enough in store.

Furthermore I have sold batches of surplus luck charms, etc.

As far as I can make out, there is no tier where production does not exceed ordinary consumption. I typically make and slot a plain IO as soon as I get a slot, replace it with a set IO as soon as a recipe bid fills, replace IOs every 5 levels on the low side of the elbow in the effectiveness curve, so I am getting through plenty of salvage. Furthermore I suspect if I could have an infinite amount of storage I'd have enough left over to do Field Crafter (and, of course, everyone does not do Field Crafter).

So... no, I disagree. I think in all tiers drops exceed usage by a considerable margin. I think they do so _more_ in the later tiers, but I think the greater price fluctuations are more down to inefficiency; new players vendor low-tier salvage not knowing if it has value, players can hold less salvage and so they don't have it when they want it, etc.

The market mechanics aren't set in stone; they could presumably be changed to make life more convenient for people who buy stuff to use and sell stuff to get rid of it.

For example. a restriction on reselling of goods that have already passed through the market or an interplayer trade would make being a marketer considerably more difficult. For clarity, I'm not saying I think that's a good idea; the ramifications are certainly not obvious.

If this was true there would be an ever increasing number for sale. This is not true, except for two items I can can think of. Demonic Threat Reports and Mathematical Proofs have been on a slow, fairly monotonic rise on the hero market almost since I9 came out. Not enough things use those salvage pieces in crafting.

Unless, of course, people vendor them when the price fluctuates down, which (obviously) they do.

Then why are there 8000-10000 of the two salvage pieces I mention?

Why does that happen with two pieces of salvage that happen to not be used in recipes very often, or by commonly popular generic IOs?

there isn't enough inf to be made vendoring salvage for a meaningful # of players to bother with it.

COULD they? Yeah. I doubt they will though.

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The lack of character binding for loot is one of the glories of this game. I would not like to see this change at all.

If you gave up the first 2 moves in Tic-Tac-Toe, you'd never win.

the biggest problem with this is, how does the game know that what you are putting up for sale hasn't been put through the market yet or vise versa? it can't.

the simple solution is for everyone who is using the market as an "IWANTITNAO!" source to stop doing that, place a reasonable bid and wait. i think that the problem lies in the name that is being used which is "market" which implies store. that lies in fault with the red side. the blue side name doesn't imply a store. it implies an auction/consignment house. of course, if people that complained used the market both ways, both selling what they drop that they don't need/won't use and placing bids on things instead of buying it now, we wouldn't be having these discussions.

I should have been more clear, honest, and straightforward in my post that I quoted here.

My point was that anyone who has an opinion that this picture demonstrates that flippers raise prices is incapable of rational thought and if you know such a person please do not think that rational discourse will sway their misguided opinion. Further, if you are going to give a noble attempt to educate such a person please don't quote them in your posts so that those people who put them on ignore can refrain from reading their ridiculous misguided opinions.

I suspect that people who have such an opinion are also of the opinion that Equilibrium Price is a concept that does not exist. Equilibrium Price is a difficult concept to properly quantify due to its ever-changing nature and value that is virtually impossible to accurately describe. However, the simple concept that somewhere exists a balance point can give one enlightening information. Such an example is when an item in City of Heroes constantly sells for a certain price, sells very quickly for that price, and when almost none or none of that item stay listed as "for sale". One can ascertain from such a situation that "the equilibrium price must be higher than this price listed in the last 5" and know that items listed for sale above this price are likely to sell in a reasonable amount of time. Equilibrium Price is just a bunch of fancy words for "that's too hot", "that's too cold" and somewhere in the middle is just right.

A person may ask me a question like "How has the talking up of respec recipes gone?" Perhaps they were making an honest inquiry. In that case the answer is "very well", but not as well as the people who invested immediately after I did due to drop rates being changed. Perhaps they were making a mocking statement showing that by talking up an item one can get more people to buy such an item and thus raise the price and profit. In such a situation I am flattered to think that someone believes my mere word can alter the course of the market.

Perhaps they were making an insult referring to the obvious nature of what Respec recipes were going to do and that I only have the ability to point out the obvious. Forum-goers have said this about me before. I must concede that this point is true. I only am able to point out the obvious. Obviously, an item like Respec recipes fall in price when Respecs are given away freely with releases of new Issues and obviously they rise in price when they are not given away freely. This knowledge or prediction is nothing to brag about nor compelling, nor surprising, nor enlightening. I have made many other obvious statements. Such statements include: Equilibrium Price exists and is helpful, and people who think the picture shown above demonstrates anything about flippers in anyway are irrational.

Let me summarize my post to hammer home the point I am trying to make:
1) Some posters are incapable of rational thought.
2) Here are some qualities of those posters and some minute level of detail of why opinions they posses are irrational.
3) If you can identify such a poster, please stop quoting them.

I need 1 that goes to 11.

I agree completely. Once upon a time, I suspected this based on dedicated PvPers I know, but was much less sure. Then I saw the price shifts that hit certain items (but not others) when PvPOs came out, and am now much more confident of this.

I'd rather see devs making BBO (best bid/offer) information visible or even show few levels of the book than them implementing restriction on reselling.

I looked at something once, and it offended me that there were something like 5800 on the market. I started buying and vendoring, or buying and destroying, them. It wasn't DTR's or Math Proofs... hydraulic pistons, maybe? I kept back a hundred so I'd be able to avoid causing unintended spikes in price.

The first thousand or 1200 went for "ordinary" prices. 500 got me some, then 2500 got me some, then 11000. At some point, I want to say "4300" left but I don't remember exactly, the price abruptly shot up from under 10K to somewhere around 50K.

My interpretation is that someone tried to corner the market in the past. They bought up the supply slowly, then started listing them for 50,000 and buying them for something less. They bought more than they sold, and the number they had for sale went up, and went up, and the number of slots they had left to buy went down, and went down... eventually they just gave up, left their sales slots full and went to do something else. It may have been more than one person doing it.

I saw this happen in realtime, over a few months, with Demonic Blood Samples heroside when the market was newish. The price fluctuated between two flipper points, and the number for sale went up slowly, and the number of bids went up faster, and eventually 1300 bids disappeared and the price collapsed over about 24 hours. I jubilantly bought a whole lot at 10K and the price went down to, like, 2400. [I was building level 35-40 EndMods by the hundred and selling them at a slight profit, but not as much as it would cost to craft your own. Ah, youth.]

The old Blood Samples stuck around until one of the double-XPs cleaned them out.

I'm going to go buy a big pile of one of those and see where the "Abandoned" point is.

Oh, one more data point: Villainside there are 170 Demonic Threat Reports. 4500 Mathematical Proofs, for what that's worth.

For a very long time, Heroes produced more high-level arcane salvage than high-level tech salvage, presumably because a lot of farmers focused on Behemoths. (There was also a great deal of PLing being done with Family, but I suspect that the PLers were less likely to dump their salvage on the market as a whole. For whatever reason, farmers seemed to prefer Behemoths while PLers preferred Family. Perhaps Family were easier while Behemoths offered better gains on rare salvage sales.) On the flip side, Villains produced more high-level tech salvage than arcane, because they didn't have any especially productive arcane foes on "farmable" maps. Some folks tried to work this to advantage by farming Possessed Scientists, but you were subject to luck of the draw on what powers the Scientists got, and they weren't terribly compliant crops (they attack from range and run away a lot).

Something around the I11-I12 era changed the character of this on hero side, and now high-level arcane salvage is actually significantly more rare than tech salvage, with the exception on DTRs (unless you've already gotten to them). I suspect this is a combination of new hero map options (RWZ arcs come to mind) that drop tech and a general deflection of some farmers into the AE (who probably now don't produce salvage at all unless they need it themselves).

If only PVP was that simple right?

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Been there, done that.

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That would drive down supply of "new" enhancements. Also, people would be more likely to overwrite enhancers rather than slot them, reducing numbers of "used" ones would that make their way into the market. This would likely drive up prices on "new" ones.

This would also make hoarding in SG bases undesirable. While this would seemingly drive up supply, I do not believe it would in practice. Bases can only hold so many enhancements - once you meet that capacity, overflow must either be sold, slotted or deleted. That means that bases represent a reserve buffer, but not a long-term drain on supply (unless new bases are being created faster than old ones are filling up, something I find hard to imagine barring supporting evidence).

Finally, on a overall acceptance level, I think this would be received similarly to how people dislike having to spend a respec to unslot enhancements. People would probably view this as a net increase in the grind they need to outfit their stable of characters, because it's a sort of perverse version of "bind on use". They aren't actually bound, but "used" enhancers would be deemed undesirable.

Edit: If enhancers dropped by an actual level as displayed on the enhancement/recipe, this would quickly turn into a way to create non-50 recipes, and would actually increase the supply available at other desirable levels. I know I would spend time passing enhancers around between my two accounts to get them to the level I wanted - unless I had to slot and then unslot them... which I might still do by creating cast-away characters PL'd to 50 just to act as IO "de-levelers".