addressing market glut

Wentworths ("WW", hero side) is experiencing a heavy market glut on many kinds of invention salvage. It is not uncommon to see 5,000 to 10,000 of the same piece of salvage for sale. It happens villain side too, but not at anywhere near the number of items seen at WW.

This leads to my two-part proposal to address the glut. Both parts would apply to hero and villain sides alike. The first part I expect to be popular, and has been suggested before.

* Offer an instant-sell capability of items at the NPC-store price

I'm guessing that the upcoming rewrite of the front end will offer this obvious quality of life improvement. It will also help immediately address the glut. When a seller sees that there are already 3,548 kinetic weapons for sale, it's likely they'll opt for the instant-sell.

The second part of my proposal won't be so popular, but I think something like it is necessary to address laggard momentum on some items, especially very expensive ones. It is also more complicated, probably involving some sort of market script that will be run each Thursday during scheduled maintenance. Several steps would be involved:

1. For the first two scheduled maintenance periods since an item was offered for sale, its offering price would be unchanged. This would be from 15-21 days, depending on what day the item was offered for sale. (I was going to say two weeks, but then I realized this would probably be done during weekly maintenance. So at even 15 days, it's longer than my first thought.)
   
2. Beginning at the third maintenance period, the current offering price would be lowered by 10%. WW/BM would refund part of their 5% surcharge of the offering price.
   
   For example, assume an item was offered for sale at 1,000,000 influence. During the third maintenance period since his offer, the offering price would drop to 900,000, and he would be credited with 5,000 influence (the difference between a 1M surcharge and a 900k surcharge). Next week, the offering price would drop to 810,000, and he would be credited with 4,500 influence.
   
   A player could avoid or minimize the price drop by removing it from market and re-offering.
   
3. The price drop would continue weekly until the new price was at or below the NPC store price, at which point the item would auto-sell at the NPC store price
   
4. Items with no NPC store price would be given some bottom value. For example, NPC's won't buy crafted IOs, but there is still a known value to them; a player receives that if he sells it during a respec.
   
5. After the prices are calculated, bids will be examined. Any item which now meets a bid price will sell to the highest bid in excess of or equal to the new price.
   
6. Any item which was offered at or below the NPC store price would instant-sell at the NPC store price. In fact, that could be one way to handle instant-sells without a new button. Offer something up for 0 or 1 gp, and it sells at the NPC store price.

*Grabs snacks and sits back to enjoy this movie...*

I've done a lot of experiments on a variety of things. At one point, I transported about a lot of low-priced high-level salvage villainside (I don't remember, Hydraulic Pistons or something. Let's call them Hydraulic Pistons for now. ) from the market to a vendor. I took it from something like 3900 items down to 2800.

Those 2800 were all priced at 50,000 inf or more.

Someone tried cornering the market -maybe two people- and driving the prices up to high levels and keeping them there.

It didn't work, and they left their slots full of overpriced Hydraulic Pistons and went about their other business. No reason to pull them, there could be a global shortage or double XP or something.

I put up fifty or a hundred low-priced Pistons and flipped them a couple times at no net profit while the stock built back up, so I didn't accidentally let the market BUY those pistons.

It turns out that 52 "automatic price drops" will take a 50,000 inf item down to autosell level. So it would eventually get rid of EVERYTHING. It's a different world that you're setting up there.

... but why the refund on their 5% down payment? If someone is greedy, or stupid, or incredibly patient, or whatever, and they put up ten Improved Cybernetics at a million inf each, why should they get their half-million inf back? (Yeah, I did that last double XP. A month or so back, they sold. Improved Cybernetics? Who knew? )

I'd rather have a function that auto-deletes certain types of recipes or salvage once it drops for you; this would save me the hassle of having to delete loot that isn't worth the effort of carrying to the vendor. I'd turn off everything except purples and rare Pool As.

i'm hoping that for double xp AE is still "bugged" or whatever it was that kept it from being double last time and as a result. people have salvage to sell again.

I'm hoping they give us the ability to right click and delete cheap crap so we don't have to go to the NPC or WW to get rid of it.

It's weird. We have some people saying that Wentworth's has too much common salvage and the market should automatically delete it, and other people saying that Wentworth's doesn't have enough common salvage and we should add additional AE ticket purchase options to allow people to buy common salvage directly instead of rolls.

We have people who want to automatically delete nearly all drops, while others are starving for those very drops.

Part of the problem with the salvage glut and salvage famine is that there are three separate tiers of salvage: 1-25, 26-40 and 41-50 (they actually drop from 1-25, 20-40 and 35-50 -- though it may 21-40 and 36-50, I'm not exactly sure). There are thousands of Ceramic Armor Plating and Kinetic Weapons for sale, yet there's historically a lack of Luck Charms, Scientific Theories, etc.

The nature of the game is that characters reach level 50 and stay there. They tend to play at level 50 because they have all their powers. This results in there being lots of items at level 50, and a dearth of items below that.

However, though level 50 characters do not usually produce items at lower levels, they consume large quantities of them: many players get IO sets at level 35 and below so that when they exemplar their characters they get the bonuses. That means there's a higher demand for mid-level salvage and recipes because level 50 characters use it frequently.

Some low-level salvage is in short supply because characters are at that level for so brief a period that no one is really producing it, and there are certain items that are heavily used in desirable recipes (Luck Charms in Accuracy, in particular).

Rather than changing the way the consignment house works, perhaps the devs should rethink the way salvage works. Possible options:

• Eliminate the tiers of salvage: just have one set for all levels.
• Increase the mid-level salvage drop zone from level 21-40 to level 50. This would fix the glut and famine at the same time.
• Remove the incentive to run only level 50 content. Right now you get powers obtained 5 levels above your exemped level. If you could use all your powers at level 35 a lot of people would run Ouroboros missions, producing recipes and salvage at that level. Making that 10 or 15 instead of 5 would give players more content to run while still having their full powers.
• Provide a way to indicate the level of a random recipe roll bought for merits or tickets. Right now it's at your level if the recipe goes that high. Ticket rolls for common salvage allow you to specify the level of the salvage; recipes should work that way too.

or... make AE drop salvage and remove ticket rolls for salvage.

the real problem is most people don't think about rolling for salvage because they view it as secondary. in their head they think "man, i really want this recipe, i hope i get it in these 15 rolls" it doesn't even cross the average mind that the salvage they will need for the recipe may be severly overpriced or unavailable.

I think this would be a bad idea. I mean, you know that purple recipies only sell at an NPC for 10K, right? So, if i wanted to be REALLY patient, i'd just set up bids at 11K or so and wait for the prices to drop.

Also, it's not completely unreasonable for them to be at the prices they're at now. A buyer wouldn't even get their listing fee back if it got sold at the NPC price.

Also, lots of things (like crafted IOs) don't HAVE an NPC buyer price. What do you do then?

Much ado about a completely irrelevant topic that should receive no dev time. The discussed button would be a nice convenience, but not to make you see less huge numbers while searching.

A real consignment house- or THAT real consignment house- doesn't take 5% of your attempted sale price up front, either. (Real-life one is a variant on Yog's Law, I suspect.)

Like this:

EPIC FAILLLL!!!