Put on your speculation caps

After reading all the posts so far in this thread, I'll throw in my two cents:

- for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT EVER put in a BoA mechanic into this game. It is the most moronic concept I've ever heard of for an MMO.

- the markets are fine. If anything, I'd say raise the inf cap so people aren't forced to avoid the market for ultra-high demand items. I've seen one offered at 6 billion!

- please, please, please do not try to curtail the storage available. It's one of the things I love about this game and in fact is the ONLY MMO I know of to let you have so much.

- If you can't make money on the markets, you really aren't trying. In 30 mins per day, it took me 10 whole days to make 1 billion redside. No spreadsheets, no tracking, just a little bit of looking at what was in demand. FWIW, it's takes me about a month to do it blueside using the same lazy methods.

I really don't understand what problem needs fixing, aside perhaps from some rarity of purples redside. However, with the coming GR update, I forsee more players enjoying the superior redside content, and thus generating more supply.

Back to OP, I suspect that the main change coming to the markets is an interface that lets you sort crafted enhancements more efficiently. There may be a "bid across a range" change, but I hope not.

A few thoughts...

Swellguy's OP: Sliding market fees make things more complicated, which I don't personally like, but the devs don't seem to have a problem with. It might very well encourage people to list items low in order to get a quick sale, but the result would be that the supply of items for sale at any given moment would drop. We'd see more empty shelves. Empty shelves tend to cause jagged price jumps. I don't think this would overall be a fix.

dave_p's idea: I don't think it's a bad idea, but I also don't think it addresses the problems that I imagine the devs are looking to solve. If nobody wants to buy stuff, then nobody really cares what happens to it. It's the high price, low volume stuff that gets the player base worked up. It's hard to tell what gets the devs worked up.

So, as Mandur12 points out, the first part of the game is to figure out what it is that the devs see as a problem. I'm going to guess it's something like:

1. Prices are high enough to scare off new players and anger some others.
2. Reduced supply of sub-50 recipes.
3. Some hero/villain disparity

Given those problems, I would speculate these solutions:
1. Reduce the vendor price on high level common IO recipes
2. Increase the crafting price set recipes, especially high value ones
3. Tie the level of recipe drops to the character, not the mob (I suspect this is a much harder change than it sounds like).
4. Lower merit costs for lower level recipes.
5. Increase merit rewards for all strike forces
6. Add new strike forces

Personally, I think #3 there deserves some consideration. I don't know about everyone else, but it seems to me that SSK has increased the number of low level characters playing on high level teams. People can exemp down, but that seems less popular. As a result, a lot of low level drops have been replaced with high level drops. That makes for more influence and higher prices overall, while at the same time lowering the availability of mid and low level recipes.

Unfortunately, it's the kind of change that would really hit at the heart of the loot drop code, so the devs might be reluctant to tinker with it. If they did, though, what would the result be?

#3 reminds me - not that these recipes are typically rare, but don't mission complete drops drop at natural character level rather than exemplared level (i.e. I flashback Crash Cage, and get not a Cloud Senses: Accuracy/Recharge but a Siphon Insight: Accuracy/Recharge)? I wouldn't mind seeing that changed.

(actually, this is basically the opposite of #3...and I like the idea of getting mob-level drops when I'm running Oroboros)

Ah man, don't you guys know, fixing the BM and WW is creating an exploit in the game, and the devs are trying to keep as many out of the game as possible. Since not everyone is entitled to purples and pvp drops... Just the really really really lucky, or the farmers who spend days to years of their lives doing the same thing over and over again. Anything more would be "unbalanced" or an exploit.

(edit: Sarcasm is a second language to me.)

Bind on AAARGH IT BURNS ?

To Macskull: thank you for filling me in. You are correct in that I never bother with non-generics below level 50. Your response was much more informative than the rather condescending one I got from Nethergoat. And despite his doubts on my veracity, I have never had trouble getting the recipes I wanted redside except for a few purples.
Regarding storage, considering I can put a dozen or more storage racks in one base, I'm content with that limitation. It's still a lot more than most MMOs allow.

To Ironblade: BoA means bind on acquire. I mentioned it cause someone else had quoted a dev talking about it as a possibility in this thread.

If there is a shortage problem redside, then I would suggest not increasing the drop rate but increasing both redside content and the desire to play it, perhaps thru, as someone mentioned, increasing red TF merit rewards. I also like the idea of lowering merit costs for lower level recipes.