Market revamp

Having recently done an informal study of the condition of the Consignment House/Black Market, I have a few suggestions to make.

First, it appears that enhancement drops are done based on how many people have powers that could slot those enhancements. While this may initially sound like a good idea, it means that the market is flooded with enhancements that very few people actually WANT to slot (for instance, Resistance sets with recharge reduction), while the ones that people do want to slot (melee damage, for instance) have become almost completely unobtainable.

This has resulted in a serious drop in people's ability to use the market to slot out their characters, which has decreased people's use of the market in general, whether to buy or sell their stuff. In conjunction with the (let's say) slight drop in membership, this has resulted in an overall drop in participation of the market.

The end result of this is that, for the popular IO sets, there are none of them on the market for large ranges of levels with hundreds of bids and spiraling costs. On the other end, there are also numerous enhancements that are unwanted and unsellable.

Similar to this is the issue with invention salvage. I don't know what algorithm they use, but the devs have never actually figured out how to balance Uncommon enhancement drops. The logical thing to do with these would be to drop them at a rate equivalent to use in recipes, although that doesn't account for those that people sell to the Quartermaster or stores. An adaptive algorithm is to have a drop pool. When someone uses one to build something, it contributes 1.1 to the pool. When someone sells one to the store or just deletes it, it puts .9 back into the drop pool. This may result in brief periods where the drop pool needs to be adjusted, but for the most part it would be self-adjusting as people use them.

I realize that a certain percentage of this is due to recent AE abuses, but feel that it is an ongoing problem that will likely never be completely fixed. The market problem can be fixed by applying an intelligent algorithm, assuming that the devs have the information resources available. Alternately, they could always implement a stop-gap where they periodically sell things from the "company stock" to the highest bidder on appropriate items, but that plan is also subject to abuse.

Best,

Mythological Beast

Fleshette, your intantaneously vicious attack suggests you've been doing too much PvP. You seem to think that smashing your opponent with energetic ad-hominem attacks makes your point without actually bothering to address any of my comments. Please don't bother responding without thinking because it's really a waste of both of our time.

MacSkull, you're right that I don't have hard data on my observations, but I have been playing this game for a bit and I'm familiar with the way the market works. What I've seen is a distinct trend that I wanted to mention. I have to admit that I don't care to spend a few weeks using the in-game market interface to do a rigorous plotting of price trends over time, and I don't have access to any hard historical data, so it wouldn't make much of a difference in presenting a solid logical argument.

It would also seem that a search for information on how drops are weighted would be pointless because you tell me that they aren't weighted at all. Paragon Wiki seems to disagree with you, but that's between you two.

You state that the Devs consider the Market to be a form of PvP, which is fine, but you seem to think that this exempts it from any form of balancing effort. Considering the huge lengths that the Devs have gone to balance PvP combat, I think that your suggestion is flawed.

And probably the idea that the market is purely a form of PvP is flawed. If the devs truly think that it is all it is, then why don't they open it up between Heroes and Villains? Who cares if one side has resources far in excess of the other, that's just life, isn't it? Anyone with enough drive should be able to get what they need, right?

The thing is that the market is supposed to be a way to improve player enjoyment. That means all players, not just the ones that get their jollies off of finding an opponent and smashing them. I'm certainly happy to make my oodles of money selling stuff at ludicrous prices to people who are desperate for a specific recipe, but it is far more important to me to maintain and possibly increase the membership base so I have people with which I can do the WANTED socialization (in contrast to the unwanted kind).

But, no, I don't think that my suggestions are the most reasonable. I'm a software engineer, but I don't know what their code can do. I just don't think that it's fair to ***** and moan about something without presenting a possible solution. If you care to contribute positively to this conversation (as opposed to just whacking down my ideas with a curt "you should know better, but you don't, so here's a knuckle sandwich instead"), then I'd welcome your input. In the mean time, I'll go do a quick survey of recipe availability to show you what I mean.

I buy, craft and sell IOs in the market to fund my toons. I wouldn't be able to do this if there were not so many people willing to pay a high price for things. I'm not one of those people that pushs the price high. I list everything at my cost. It's not my fault that someone comes by and buys it at a much higher price. I like it when they do, but I didn't force them to do that.

The market was set up as a true free market system. Supply and demand set the price for things. If you don't like the price of something, don't buy it. If things don't sell, the price will come down. If someone is too lazy to find the items by playing the game or crafting the IO, they only have themselves to blame for paying a very high price.