Call it

I'm moving a metric ton of Hamis blueside to Redside for my sg.
I'm moving a bunch of Lotg 7.5 redside for my sg.

Of the excess, many will go to the Marke, hopefully diluting prices in the process.

I predict PvPIOs will stay about the same, salvage will trend down and the big ticket stuff will probably move up/down +10% as villain inf gets absorbed into the system.

The Devs will also seed the Market surrepetitiously and billions will "poof" into the Aether...

One of the main things I anticipate it will open up is an actual market for those darned pet IOs that drop Hero-side.

I don't know, that sounds pretty sure to me.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

Well for bids. But I don't recall the FAQ covering stuff for sale.

Ah, true. I was only thinking in one direction, apparently.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

Ok, I'll throw my opinion on what will happen as a market participant and not as an employee of NCsoft/Paragon Studios.

TL; DR version Player Behavior will affect prices more than the Market Merge. Also I like throwing sharks at people in PvP.

The markets being merged will create a larger pool of market participants for both sides, creating a market that is less vulnerable to supply swings and manipulation. At the same time player behavior will change based on a shift in player priorities, whatever those end up being.

The player behavioral changes will have a much greater impact on the market than anything. This is unfortunately non transparent so swings in market prices that occur from behavioral changes are often construed as having some other source, including manipulation or inflation.

Let me give an example that actually recently happened to illustrate.

After one of the recent issue releases, one player who goes by the name of XXXXXXy made a relatively large bet on respec recipes. XXXXXXy noticed that the price of respec recipes was affected by time since the last issue release. Most issue releases come with a respec, so demand for respec recipes would drop dramatically (and therefore the price would drop as well). As time went on from the issuing of a freespec, more players would have used up the granted respec and be in the market for purchased respecs causing an increase in the price of respec recipes.

XXXXXXy gathered up all his available cash and bought an extravagant number of respec recipes for a relatively low price. He was open about what he was doing, and discussed it on the forums. Some months later, after it had been quite some time since a free respec was given out, he then proceeded to sell the recipes he had bought for a lower price for a much higher price. He used all the inf he had gained through this maneuver to vacation in Aruba*.

A number of players accused XXXXXXy of manipulating the price on respec recipes as a result of this, and for the record he probably did affect the price in some small way. There were less respec recipes on the market than would have been otherwise so it probably drove the price up a small amount. However the number of respec recipes that dropped globally and were made available on the market between his decision to buy and his decision to sell was many times greater than the relatively small number of recipes he had gathered and so his purchase made a very small global blip of price increase.

His public discussion of the well observed cycle of respec recipe prices also potentially had a small effect on the price, but this was actually more dangerous to him financially as a greater number of participants in this activity increased the risk that he could take a bath on the whole gamble. If someone else had a significant number of recipes and dumped before he did, he would have had much less profit potential.

What XXXXXXy did wasn't market manipulation, it was an observation of player behavior and making an informed guess based on historical precedent in an attempt to reap some rewards in the form of inf. XXXXXXy didn't change the price, player behavior did. Whatever we think of the morality of his actions (and I can respect the opinion of those who maintain that super heroes do not engage in market speculation), the price swing was caused by the most significant determiner in the market, what players choose to do.

So instead of thinking about how the market merge will affect the market, think about how your behavior might change as a result of I18 and Going Rogue. Is your behavior typical of a significant group of a players and if so how might this effect prices?

Unfortunately for me, most of my playtime is spent playing a stalker and throwing sharks at people who PvP. This is probably because I moderate the PvP forums and it makes me feel better to throw sharks at the people who frequent those forums. I'm probably therefore an atypical player so I can't use my preferences as a guide. I can think about what you all want to do, but I do that for work so I won't spend my free time doing it.

Hope this provides some small amount of insight,
-Mod08

*the part about Aruba may not be strictly true.

Damn you, Smurphy!

I mean XXXXXXy!

Lots of good points here I didnt consider. Thanks!

I will repeat what other people have mentioned once or twice before: the fact that such a wild and massively game inmpacting change has NOT yet generated much, if any, DOOM despite a large number of sharp people trying to look at it from every conceivable angle. This is, and of itself, quite remarkable and definately heartening.

Of course, we may be all fooling ourselves outrageously. It's the human condition after all.

Thank you for that great post. Maybe it will convince more people that it actually does work that way.

Mod08 is a smart person.

Another example in the same vein: when Demon Summoning hit, someone made a good sum on selling Bone, Dragon, and Burned Wing costume recipes. They wouldn't have been able to get as much as they did for these fairly common recipes if they hadn't suddenly come into high demand - as always, the buyers drive the price.

So, the question is, what will people be doing when GR hits?
- Rolling alts
- Playing the Mysterious End Game
- Switching sides

I can think of a few things one might want to buy now and sell later based on these likely activities. But the more important point here is that, as the market increases in size, individual sellers will have even less capacity to drive prices than they do now. Which means that the big winners will continue to be those who observe the practices of buyers rather than sellers.

There are essentially three time-tested ways to make money by buying and selling on the market, in order of risk:
1. Buy something for less than its guaranteed vendor value, then sell it to a vendor.
2. Buy components, create an item of higher value, and sell it.
3. Correctly predict that an item will increase in value, buy it cheaply, and sell it dearly.

The market merge, like any change to the game, will allow some money to be made through method 3, and may create a price discontinuity that affects method 2.

My prediction is that salvage will go down slightly in price from blueside stadard due to increase in supply.

I mostly only flip salvage, or buy low priced IO recipies to sell to a store for profit, but my guess on IO recipe prices will quickly balance at about current blueside norms due to heavy blueside domination of the market.

Blueside population and item availability is high enough, that it could easily be assumed that blueside prices are the true market value for those items. Redside supply being added to blueside might lower prices slightly, but I think that we probably wouldn't have noticed had the markets been merged without telling anyone.

As to why it good that the markets get merged? I'll give a real example of market manipulation that happened a good long time ago.

This guy I know got bored one day while running from the BM and a nearby store, and decided he was going to screw with people. He looked through the salvage prices, and saw that there were about 200 spiritual essenses selling for 500 each. With 15 transaction slots he knew he could have 150 for sale plus 30 in the vault and 30 on him. He decided he was going to add a few zeroes to the price.

The first 50 were bought quick for the basic 500, then the next group for a little over 1200, at this time all bids for the item were going up not just his. with about 100 bought he was getting into the storage ones. jacking up the bid to 10000 each. Keeping some slots open to bid high on lowball entries too keep the price up, then put a lot of them up for sale at 50000 each and bought 5 for 60000. By the next day all of them were sold for 50000 and the price settled back down at about 15000 since people knew others would pay that much for them.

With more items available due to merging the markets, people wouldn't be able to do that as easily.

GR presents an interesting conundrum for me to predict what the players will be doing. I think this is the first time that every side and every level will have something new to do.

There will be lots of new characters (level 1-20) created to experience Praetoria and the new powersets (kinetic melee, electric control, dual pistols and demon summoning).

There will be lots of level 50 players dusting off characters to open the Alpha slot and get the necessary items to fill it.

Characters of every level over 20 will be running the new alignment and morality missions to experience life on the other side . . . or in the middle. But now that the markets are merged, I believe that we will see less people leave red side. Or if they do leave, it will only be temporarily to earn an accolade or other badges and return.

My guess is that the 1-20 content will initially see the most play. New zones, new missions, new technology in the branching dialogues, new badges, and new powersets make it highly desireable for a lot of different players and play styles. Accordingly, look for low level recipes and salvage to drop in supply and go up in price.

[sarcasm]There will be an increase in the amount of level 50 stuff available, but the amount of lower level stuff available will remain the same because 0+0=0.[/sarcasm]

My doomy predictions:

The inf price of current goods (except respec recipes) will go down as new phat lewt is introduced. The new phat lewt will sell in the billions as bidders are forced to bid blindly. Those blind bids will tie up inf, lowering the price of all other goods.

The inf price of respec recipes will continue to go up as there's a wave of build experimentation, one free respec will be insufficient to meet needs, and the $9.99 paid respec price is far too high to compete with inf farmers/sellers.