Put on your speculation caps

I started some rambling thoughts on what fixes Positron might be hinting at to help the markets and while I personally think nothing short of a lot of players really can help over the long haul or a single market so time spent on a hero/villain doesn't take away from the other side's market I did come up with this idea and thought I'd put it out there to be dissected and destroyed by the market gurus.

What if the market fees were less for faster sales?
Time on market to sale results in fee %
instant is 0%
< 1 minute is 2%
< 1 hour is 4%
< 1 day is 7%
< 5 days is 10%
< 30 days is 12%
< 60 days is 20%
60 days or more is 25%

Would that impact the markets and in what way? It would seem to me to put some pressure on selling faster (that is lower listing prices) but would it?

No.

And 60 days or more is nom nom nom.

That would be a terrible idea. I would be EXTREMELY leery of putting ANYTHING on the market. Especially items that I know take a while to sell.

I should NOT pay a higher fee cause something is worthless in game based on the way the devs coded which salvage is used in which recipe.

EDIT: I also DO NOT agree that they should be doing things to force people to put stuff up less inf when its the BUYERS who pay the outrageous prices.

Don't forget part of this game is to try to guess what Posi is going to fix to help the casual player that will break the markets ala PvP.

Not that this would ever happen, but...

I would get rid of vendor options for recipes & salvage. Force those to sell at the market to increase supply of less than desirable items.

In exchange, create a mechanism to ensure there's always a buyer, which is to say if there are no "live" buyers, have the store buy it at current vendor prices. This would mean current sellers face zero loss of income if they were going to otherwise vendor the stuff. Then, these items would enter into an inventory which could then be purchased at vendor prices x2 (or whatever the usual markup on SOs and such are).

What, going to the market to vendor stuff is a PitA? I agree! Give us at least limited Wents/BM access from every store & quartermaster. This whole, paying higher for like-origin store concept is antiquated back to when 10~50K meant something. Just give ppl access to every origin and each store, as well as a marketplace interface. This is a pure QoL win for all.

From the seller's PoV, for high demand items, it's business as usual. If you're going in looking to vendor a low demand item and someone happens to have a bid out for it, you'll get more inf (assuming that bid is more than vendor prices, which it'll now have to be to ever fill). If there's no "live" demand, you'll get your usual vendor prices anyway. Chances are good though that you'll score something better. This also eliminates ppl vendoring purples or whatever, either through ignorance or a bad miskey (people who want to eliminate those from the game for whatever reason can still delete them).

From the buyer's PoV, okay, no more stealing stuff for 1 inf (shakes fist at cheap bastiches who do this!). You have to pay a minimum of 250 or 1000 or whatever miniscule inf for the high supply stuff. BFD. If there's no supply, well, there wasn't going to be any supply anyway, but for those cheap/low demand items (mid level snipe set, anyone?) that most ppl just vendor, there might be some cached supply in the market.

No, this doesn't address things like inflation, rarity of purps and the really high demand items, etc, but I don't see those as necessarily problems. Rare items *should* be hard to get. What shouldn't be so hard to get are the cheap drops that get removed from the game from ppl vendoring them.

Seriously, what's the downside?

I like your idea Dave but I know it will never happen.

"The devs are forcing us to use the markets! It's supposed to be optional!" posts would bury us in rage.

i rarely vendor anything, the only time i even go to the quartermasters is when i need to get or reslot SOs (i dont see vendors before SOs, and i only see vendors when the SOs im using become out-dated)

so in the end, i put everything i dont want on the market (although 99% of the time its only recipes since i usually just delete common salvage when it gets full because it is so dang cheap to buy)

the only thing i do vendor from time to time when i know im getting full is generic IO recipes (since those usually sell for double to triple the market price that they are listed for)

Part of the excercise is to also speculate on a problem that the devs have identified. The OP infers by his speculation that the devs have identified high prices as a problem (and produced a system that might provide downward price pressure). Other than Castle stating that off-market transactions going for above the single person inf cap being obviously "horribly broken", has there been anything to suggest that the devs consider high prices a problem?

Like, I personally think the unavailability of non-level capped recipes to be a problem, but by all indications the devs do not.

Liquidity Redside is almost certainly a problem. The dev team should be able to easily deduce the willingness to use the market for each side, and maybe that's something they're targetting to fix. I think dave_p's suggestion has merit, but I also don't think I'll come to this forum if it goes live for fear of being buried by the nerdrage, heh.

On a side note, Castle did state here:

Every newborn gets a chocolate eclair!

/obscure?

one way to increase liquidity and generate lower price pressure would be to eliminate storage completely.

i mean it'll never happen, but if you couldn't stash stuff away and had to list it, there'd be a big incentive to price it for insta-sale.

Let's see.

I'm a Developer and a sadist.
I don't care about the Market crowd.
Villains aren't producing enough items.
I need a kludge fix.

Fix the first: Double all merit rewards redside.

This would, in theory, end up with more recipes being produced in sold. It could also produce more recipes in storage.

Fix the second: Increase drop rate of Pool A and B recipes.

This would devalue Pool A and Bs and create excess so that players can trade them on the market.

Fix the third: Seed the Market with a steady stream of desireable recipes.

Each day, hundreds of rares enter the Market. Ah, you say, I'll just use my vast stores of inf to buy all of these and re-sell, brilliant! I think the Devs would see this strategy and somehow limit us from bidding on more than one of these items.

Actually, I can't see the last happening, as far as limiting bids goes.

Fix the fourth: A new Merit system for playing redside content...

Yes...perfect. These Merits would be earned for playing unique redside content and could be turned in for recipes, salvage and so on at new vendors. So you wouldn't get these in coop zones. It's unnecessary, needlessly complicated and confusing! Implement it folks!

The biggest problem you're going to encounter with increasing drops rates, and thereby, supply, is that on the stuff that is already pretty common, Pool A/B especially, you'll lower the prices somewhat, but not dramatically enough to really matter.

The stuff that is ALWAYS in demand, is still going to go for near the prices it does now and will continue to creep. Why? Because both Red and Blue side there are enough players around with old money they're sitting on and are willing to pay for such things at ever increasing prices. Over the long run, you'll see prices on most of the most sought after recipes top out at 2B (on the market) because that is the way the markets in this game work in conjunction with currency and it's caps.

If you want to affect the markets, drop the Inf caps to 1B. Then, with the new issue and the ability to mail inf to your own toons, remove all options to trade Inf to other players/accounts.

Will any of this happen? No. Will anything "fix" the markets? No. Why? Because they are WORKING, it's that simple really. Read through the threads and replies that come up here and you'll see both camps..

Those that think prices are too high, because those individuals don't know how to generate in-game wealth.

And those that think things are fine because they understand the in-game mechanics related to markets and currency.

If someone wants to pay "X", let them. If someone wants to sell for "Y", good for them. Are there problems with supply, no, not really, no insofar as it's easier to level a toon from 1 to 50 and then suddenly want all those shiney lvl 50 recipes. Which is really the underlying issue.

It takes far, far less time to GET to lvl 50 than it does to generate the in-game wealth and resources to outfit said toon the way people "expect" to outfit them.

And by "expect" I mean, if you watch any of the Archtype forums you'll see that at least half of the builds people are going for contain slotting IOs that are incredibly unreasonable for all but the most devoted of players, those who have vast wealth already build, reserves on-hand or who understand market mechanics.

So if you want a tl;dr, i think the markets and situation is fine as is, people just have higher expectations than they do will to earn. Would I like to see a merger? Of course. I don't play villians because of the difficulty (relative to the ease Blue-side) of being able to get the recipes/salvage i want/need for even a modest build at prices that don't require, at time, horendous time syncs.

Part of the problem does seem to be items that just aren't worth being listed on the market because they take up the market slot.

What if there was a place where these things could be given and taken for free? Essentially vendoring it for zero inf (deleting it). Then making it available for anyone to take (this part of the idea I think others have had), also for nothing? Maybe even flag the item as "charity", where it can't be vendored or auctioned (if that is even possible).

That or set up a charity function/tab within the market interface, where something can be listed not-for-profit, but the item doesn't take up a market slot.

There are 11,058 Computer Viruses for sale heroside.
69 Springfoot: Endurance recipes at level 50 .
50 Essence Of Curare: Hold/Range at level 50.
16 Focused Smite: Acc/End/Rech at level 40.

What exactly is the problem you're trying to solve here?

Edit: replying to dave_p .