Why the devs are right to worry about hoarding...

You need to read this thread

What is obscenely rich ?

Qualitatively, hoarding is a problem in terms of maintaining market supply of a particular item.

We can't tell quantitatively how big a problem it is just based on this thread.

Sigh. OK enough of the blame game. We've had ebil marketeers, flippers, RMTers, PvPers, PLers, farmers, 50s, PvP farmers, merit farmers, exploiters, AE players and now hoarders.

Are people going to start accusing trial folks of being the problem in the market now? RPers? catgurls?

The market works on a double blind supply and demand auction system. If you can't get what you want there then you'll have to find it some other way. In other words, play more. That or be extremely patient.

In almost every case, the group being accused is dedicating their time to getting the loot/rewards. And in almost every case, there are hard limits to the rewards so nothing is infinite. Once those caps are reached it is exceeding hard to keep the loot coming in, so it gets transfered or used somehow.

If you're thinking that people hoard things because they just decided to do so on a whim, think again. They know what the market does and they know how much their junk is worth, it's their reason to play. Making them get rid of it ruins their fun and if it's no fun they stop playing.

No more hoarding player = no more new loot. You won't solve any problems there by nerfing their storage.

Hoarding is no worse than somebody vendoring everything they don't want, and crafting anything they want to use. It's the exact same effect... the stuff never makes it to market... it's as if that player never logged on and it never dropped in the first place. Again, this renders hoarding a non-issue.

IIRC, when the market was implemented, the Devs said that it was to be considered an OPTIONAL feature. Keeping the market supplied is not anybody's responsibility. This is why they implemented other avenues to obtain recipes & salvage (merits & AE tix).

Any way you look at it, whether one chooses to use the market OR NOT, one must still play the game for their loot. And since there is a finite capacity for storing that loot, it will *eventually* require one to make decisions regarding said loot; to keep, to market, to vendor, to use, to give away, etc.,.

Hoarding isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's what you do with it. As for me:

Individual character(s) - I couldn't save a rare recipe when one of my 50's or friends could slot or sell it today. Those recipes will be there in drops or market tomorrow, so will our earning potential.

Group - We'll hoard seasonal perks for our supergroup chapters. When new powersets come out, we could pay for dozens of halloween salvage sets off-season in Wentworths but there's a bit of sentiment involved in our sharing what we got trick or treating together months ago.

I admire your shinies and hope they give you great pleasure.

(I'm not a hoarder, myself. I do different things, which are even less comprehensible to most people.)

"Hoarding" is not the problem, not really. Inflation is the problem. Were there no inflation, there would be no incentive to hoard. Because of inflation, hoarding makes sense: anything you sell, you will have to pay more for if you want to buy it again. This is what keeps things off the market: the sense that if you sell stuff, the expectation is that you will never be able to get it back for the inf you receive in return, no matter how much inf that happens to be.

The second problem is that market prices, even without inflationary trends, are so high that it's a rather daunting prospect to be able to afford anything on the market just by defeating mobs and vendoring junk. When a piece of rare salvage is going for 3.5 million inf, and mobs are dropping around 2,000 inf, you have to defeat 1,750 mobs before you can buy it. This is the only reason why the market is as well supplied as it is: in order to buy on the market, you have to get a lucky drop that you can sell first, because the alternative ways of making enough inf for what you want to buy is quite daunting.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

In all the time I've been playing I have yet to find that many purples, and that's across two accounts!

I have to agree with PumBumbler: Hoarders hoard because it is their nature.
*curls up on pile of gold*

I have a private base on Virtue that has several bins filled with crafted IOs. One contains random drops that I've crafted, one contains level 50 damage/defense/resist/heal IOs that I intend to sell (I usually fill it up and then use it as extra inventory to sell during a double exp weekend, for example). Two are filled with IOs in the 30-33 range, which is what I normally slot my characters with. As noted, such IOs can be difficult to come by, so I like to keep them handy for when I'm IOing out a new character.

If anything, e-mail has made it easier for me to put stuff into and pull stuff out of my base storage, since several of my characters are in other SGs.

But I tend to sell all purple drops and level 50 IO drops, if they're sellable. And I sell a lot of other IOs that I get too. I like to make money, I like to see the market working, and I don't have a need to hoard everything I get my hands on. And I try to ignore the fact that all of my ranged damage IOs aren't all together (I was compelled to rearrange everything in one of my bins only one time, so far). ^_^

I sell all my salvage. I don't hoard any salvage ever. At all.

So I'm more of a marketeer than a hoarder. But I guess I knew that already. ^_^