Entire Market Front End Rewritten

What flaws? My example was an exact description of the way the City of Heroes market works, except that the winning bid isn't ENTIRELY random; there are ways to influence it that I didn't touch on.

If a simpler way of saying it would make it easier for you:

There is demand for pieces of the Crushing Impact set. Some people want it at low levels, and will only buy it there. Some want it at high levels, and will only buy it there. These people are irrelevant to the discussion, because they only create demand at one specific level. A third group, however, just wants the set, and doesn't care what level the set is at. THESE PEOPLE CREATE DEMAND AT THE LEVEL 50 RANGE, BECAUSE THEY DON'T CARE WHAT LEVEL IT IS, AND LEVEL 50 IS WHERE THE SUPPLY IS. Because the supply is there, and they want it now, and they don't care what level they get, they go for the level with the most availability.

Nobody is saying "There's more supply of Sting of the Manticore than Luck of the Gambler, so people buy Sting instead." We're saying "There's more available of the same recipe at a different level range, so people go to that level range to have a better chance of getting it."

However, your too busy singing "lalala I can't hear you!" with your head up your ***, to even consider that this makes sense.

Also, stop trying to use real-world economics in a debate about the market. Unless you know how to kill someone and rip Clockwork Gears and Hamidon Goo out of the corpses to sell on a world-wide consignment house, it really doesn't apply. At all.

Actually, it does. Does it apply perfectly? Not in my opinion, but in my opinion it doesn't apply perfectly in the real world unless you attach a lot of assumptions. Those assumptions are sort of standardized for the "real world" situation, so people tend to think of them as part of the supply/demand theory, but they're not.

Applying supply/demand modeling successfully to situations like what we're discussing in CoH's market requires one to understand how the game's market mechanisms differ from the "real world" that economic theory tries to model. Not because the model doesn't handle it, but because we have a tendency to try to shape the model just like we would in the real world, when that's the wrong fit. Human psychology matters to economics, and CoH has its own unique impacts on how we think when we use its market. But supply/demand economic theory is intentionally quite vague to help it to be fitted around a wide array of concrete situations. It does have relevance around here, just not in the sense of letting us map the CoH market directly to real world ones.

Edit: The notion that you'd have to kill people and strip salvage off of them for economic theory to be valid in the game is pretty silly. I hope it was intentional exaggeration.

I took your suggestion, because reading that tiny text seemed like too much work.

Shopping mall brings customers to multiple stores because of convenience, thus supply leads to demand. Megastores use similar principles.

The large supply of 50s makes it more convenient to buy them than IOs at other levels. If you are in a hurry it would be stupid to leave bids at 49.

I have to admit, I copy/pasted it into something else to read it.

Hyperbolic, but serious. Nowhere in real life do I, or anyone else, have the ability to repeat an action which generates both materials and money out of thin air, with no cost to anyone except time.

In real life, to get a hamburger, you need to buy land, clear land, buy cows, feed and water cows (which requires a separate production cycle), send cows to the slaughterhouse, send the sides of beef to the butcher, send the meat to a packing plant, send the hamburger patties to a restaurant, repeat similar steps for each other ingredient, and then have someone at the restaurant make the hamburger. Money would be spent at each point, and I'd never accidentally get something I needed to make fried chicken, or sushi, for example - I'd have to get those separately, through the same method.

In City of Heroes, I would punch Skulls until one dropped a [Bun], another dropped a [Hamburger Patty], a third dropped a [Hamburger Toppings], and another dropped [Recipe: Hamburger]. I would get paid for each Skull I beat up, whether he dropped a useful item or not, and if he dropped [Recipe: Fried Chicken] or [Sushi Rice], I could sell those for extra money or save them for later use. Once I had all the items, I would have to pay a crafting fee to make the hamburger, but that would likely cost less than the money I received from a fraction of the Skulls I beat up.

Yes, Supply and Demand, and other real-world economics theories can be applied to the game, but when we have infinite resources that can be infinitely reproduced at no cost, and we get paid to produce them, a lot of the parallels end up being tangental, at best.

Yes, my opinion is not only are the 50 recipes more available, that most people with 50's want lvl 50 recipe.

Though on the other hand, in view of changes to the epics unlocking at 50, there must be less 50's around than I thought.

Control + mouse wheel ...

Natural male enhancement?

This, There is nothing like seeing to the heart of the matter.

There are entire categories of activities, that can only be done efficiently at 50. Its almost pointless to go for epic badges if you are exemplared, farming for purples would be silly, powerleveling other people ? all practically require you to be at 50.

Seeing as the farmers/powerlevelers are the people who generate the supply, the demand and the inf to pay for its really not surprising that 50 is their sale / purchase point.

You toss in the fact that if you want to buy anything off level in a reasonable time, you better be willing to dedicate a bunch of slots to the effort and be willing to wait upwards of a month or two for your goods, its really no surprise that 50 is where the activity is.

Edit: Or to put it another way, according to the last hour challenge good farmers are currently earning 40 million/hr raw inf. So for them to wait a week to save 5 million makes how much sense ?

Paragraph 2, good example of why in the real world if you ask 2 economists a question you get 6 different answers.