The supposed evilness of ebilness
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-02-15 18:22 in The Market and Inventions
As has been said many times, flippers don't raise prices, they normalize prices. They flip by establishing both a price ceiling and a price floor. Nobody can get one for less than the flipper's floor, but nobody will have to pay more than the flipper's ceiling. Flippers tend to push prices towards the equilibrium price. So I suppose if the current price is below equilibrium, they'll push it up. On the other hand, if the price current price is above equilibrium, they'll push it down. In any case, they're not changing the equilibrium price. They're just making prices more stable, more like a store.
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I'd beat virtual baby harp seals in this game while NPC's cried if it got me 1k inf each hit.
If it got me more inf, I'd stab other toons in the eye as they browsed at WW.
What was the question again?
I bet you play Monopoly and Scrabble to win, too, don't you? That's just... ebil!
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
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While the AE has had some impact I think the larger cause is that I16 fixed a long standing bug which was causing level 50s to earn less inf than they should. This means that level 50s are now earning almost twice the inf that they should be earning.
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Originally Posted by Enyalios
AE plain and simple. People can't be bothered to travel back and forth from AE to sell common rolls for tickets but can for rares. The price for the conversion from tickets to infamy here is not just the time to pop the tickets but also the time to move the coverted salvage to market. Its the same reason I've made hundreds of millions selling purples I had laying around when just 3 issues ago they were going for a 500k or 1M.
The reason people can't outfit their 50's is because AE has changed the ratio of the supply of 50's to the supply of pops by lowering the amount of pops to equip those 50's with while at the same time making it much easier to get those 50's who need to be equipped. If you don't like it, don't blame the ebil marketeers, blame the people who have 11 50's and don't know where Nerva or Sharkhead are. |
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FWIW, my badging and AE oriented characters routinely use common ticket rolls. It's a fairly efficient way to make progress towards your common IO crafting badges and memorize a lot of recipes to make them still more efficient at this. The resulting IOs are first passed off to my levelling characters; or if none need them, sold at the market for a technical loss (i.e. the salvage and recipe would have cost more.) I will buy recipes to do this on the market, but not for much above sale to vendor prices. The alternative is to just buy them up front from the table, and that's often the path of least resistance.
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Originally Posted by Enyalios
AE plain and simple. People can't be bothered to travel back and forth from AE to sell common rolls for tickets but can for rares. The price for the conversion from tickets to infamy here is not just the time to pop the tickets but also the time to move the coverted salvage to market. Its the same reason I've made hundreds of millions selling purples I had laying around when just 3 issues ago they were going for a 500k or 1M.
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Originally Posted by Enyalios
Discussing Flipping:
If nobody flipped prices would be lower.... |
Not necessarily.
Assuming it was an item with actual demand you'd get the 'boom/bust' cycle I observed during my experiment with Ancient Bones. There were times when an abundance of Ancient Bones were selling for 10 inf, there were times when there were very few available and they were going for a few hundred K each.
Enter the flipper.
In the beginning I raised the price floor from roughly 10 inf to 1,000 inf.
At the same time I lowered the price ceiling from several hundred K to 15k, initially.
The other thing that happened was that with a good, steady market for Ancient Bones (me) people were motivated to list their on the market instead of vendoring or deleting them.. Average supply was vastly increased. The average 'for sale' range was between 0 and 100 when I started. When I walked away it was up to several thousand.
Flippers raise the price floor (which encourages supply) and lower the price ceiling. It does not follow that Captain Casual is getting gouged- he was just as likely to try and buy an Ancient Bone during a supply drought when prices were in the hundreds of thousands as buy one for 10 inf.
With a flipper in the equation, he's guaranteed what he wants for 'market' price (or if he's patient, at the flipper's cost +1).
Without access to the dev's numbers we can't know for sure what impact a flipper has, but my observations suggest that they are value neutral at worst.
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I'm gonna go and normalize 'thorns' now. I'll sell them cheaper than I'll buy them if necessary.
Any and all spelling, grammar and logic errors are intentional so this post will blend seamlessly into the Internet
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What does "the supply of pops" refer to in this context?
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Originally Posted by Enyalios
The reason people can't outfit their 50's is because AE has changed the ratio of the supply of 50's to the supply of pops by lowering the amount of pops to equip those 50's with while at the same time making it much easier to get those 50's who need to be equipped.
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Flippers are completely inconsequential if you're willing to wait a little.
Chaos Theorems are going for 150,000 inf right now, blueside. I'm not crazy, so I'm not going to pay for that, and I know that flippers tend to lowball the price quite a bit. Straight from my logs,
02-17-2010 11:31:29 You bid 20,000 total on 10 Chaos Theorem.
They were going for 150,000 each in the sell history.
02-17-2010 11:38:34 You have purchased Chaos Theorem.
Seven minutes later, I bought a few for 2,000.
02-17-2010 11:38:45 You got 3 Chaos Theorem.
Did some other stuff, switched toons, and then when I checked the market again on that character:
02-17-2010 12:46:09 You got 7 Chaos Theorem.
They were probably bought quite a while ago, but I just didn't check for an hour. The market history at this point still showed all the sales for 150,000 inf. Flippers don't drive up the prices, impatient people who must BUY IT NAO drive up the prices.
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As I said when a friend started purpling out a character: The only thing the market asks of you is patience.
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Originally Posted by Leandro
Flippers are completely inconsequential if you're willing to wait a little.
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Discussing Flipping:
If nobody flipped prices would be lower, but supply would be distributed more randomly rather than to those who are willing to pay the higher prices. Thus flipping should raise the economic efficiency of the in-game economy by passing items more reliably to those willing to pay the higher prices rather than to those who just happened to have a bid out for the item at 38 or something (who often intend to vendor it!)
Discussing the creation of artificial shortages:
It is nigh impossible for a single player no matter how motivated to create a sustainable shortage of salvage. Trust me, I tried a few times and though I moved the price for a couple hours or in lower volume items a day or two, unless I was going to stay online all day working on it I couldn't keep prices up. I'd be more opposed to these schemes if they actually worked, but they don't no matter how many pangean soils you cram into your base or whatever. The problem is to drive the price up you either have a huge left-over stock at some point wasting storage space or you delete a large number of the item to raise the price. They don't work so meh on how bad they are. I don't believe people do these because they won't profit.
So what is causing the recent rise in common and uncommon salvage prices while a concurrent drop in rare salvage?
AE plain and simple. People can't be bothered to travel back and forth from AE to sell common rolls for tickets but can for rares. The price for the conversion from tickets to infamy here is not just the time to pop the tickets but also the time to move the coverted salvage to market. Its the same reason I've made hundreds of millions selling purples I had laying around when just 3 issues ago they were going for a 500k or 1M.
The reason people can't outfit their 50's is because AE has changed the ratio of the supply of 50's to the supply of pops by lowering the amount of pops to equip those 50's with while at the same time making it much easier to get those 50's who need to be equipped. If you don't like it, don't blame the ebil marketeers, blame the people who have 11 50's and don't know where Nerva or Sharkhead are.
Eris