The Merged Market First Month Trepidations/Predictions

I for one am ecstatic over the merger, but am wondering what levels of fluctuations there will be before we see a settling in of what will be considered normal.

Obviously heroside carry's the heaviest weight.

So will everything villian side just adjust to ye old standard heroside costs?

Or will there be an influx of certains types of recipes/enhancers from villian side which will offset the market in general?

With the merger we'll see more of everything, including purps, and those hard to get rare recipes. Will the cost of these higher end items get watered down, or jump substantially?

I'm interested to hear your conjectures/predictions/and, or/ prophecies of dooooooom in regards to this merger.

I suspect that "prices in general" will go up on low-priced items and not come down. When we lost access to the markets for a couple days, rare salvage went up by about a million and kinda stayed there.

massive influx of new & returning players + history wipe = MADNESS.


every marketeer for themselves, dogs and cats living together....TOTAL ANARCHY!

A lot is changing -- new powersets, new Praetoria zones, the incarnate system, side switching, the fix to AE for allies. That makes it hard to say exactly what will happen. It really depends on what content players choose to run.

My guess is that a lot of level 50 content will be run by people who want to have level 50s switch sides and get their incarnate powers. That will mean a larger supply of purples, but since they're playing 50s, it may also increase the demand for purples. Net result is probably a wash.

A lot of people will be playing the new powersets, so that will mean an influx of new characters and potentially a larger supply of mid-level rare recipes -- if players choose to run content that gives reward merits. But if players are just PLing their new characters they won't get any merits and we'll just see increased demand on the market with no increased supply in that range.

So, in short: the market will do what we make it do.

The BM will stop sucking.

Melee sets will continue to hold steady. I expect Crushing Impacts to go up a bit even though the current rage is soft capping everything. I expect hold sets to experience a slight rise.

Also for Electric Control, I expect a decent rise in the chance for stun proc in the Endurance Modification sets.

I expect LoTGs to go up a bit because people will be running new content with no guarantee that it will provide merits.

Feel free to act on my guesses, it's not like sharing them will make me lose profit

I don't think I am saaavy enough to take advantage of the chaos but I am just smart enough to lose a bunch of inf trying to so I am planning on conservative moves for the first month and see how things shake out.

I won't a killing but I won't get killed either.


Mainly I'll do the content and let it go at that.

Of course I'm keeping any melee and pet set rares that drop between now and then.

One thing you're almost definitely going to see.

A decrease in ultra-high-priced supplies.

You know what I'm talking about. You see # of something for sale. And the last 5 were all 5-20 million. You bid 21-60 million, then try 100 million and it just doesn't sell.

You have some people who've put stuff in for ridiculous prices and just LEFT it there. These people will get all of that auto-refunded.

All the extreme AFK marketing will take an initial hit because of this.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Ditto - or at least, I would have done that, if not for the fact I don't like masterminds and can't stand playing them.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

*shrug* I'm just loading up on PvP IOs to leak onto the market once the merger happens. The only real buying I've been doing is getting salvage to craft recipes I've got sitting around, because I want my recipes to be in enhancement form.

Okay I am ready now.
I have wept over my lost profits to be. Just when I got a market cornered they added more corners.
I have found a couple of niches on both sides (four total) and silently sunk my inf so that I may profit from market panics (or failing that from inflation).
So now I wait (and go back to killing a lot of stuff).

The thrill is gone. Bring it on.

Go ahead and merge them already!!

I agree that the combination of factors is going to make transient prices very chaotic. I don't think we can really predict what will be going on for the 1st week. There will be people both buying things for what we will think insanely high prices and ridiculously low bargains. All the sweeper bids by every flipper out there will be reset, as will all the currently overpriced sales. Supply on currently massively oversupplied common salvage (5000+ for sale) will go to zero.

Prices in our markets tend to have a lot of friction, unless the item is in low supply, and everything will simultaneously hit zero for sale and no history. That tells me that everything will reset and end up "sticking" at brand new prices that have a weak relationship to the historic norms.

While villains currently pay more for the most desireable items, I suspect but cannot prove that a lower percentage of villain players are active on the BM because they "trust" that market less than heroe players trust WW. If the merger results in a closer match in how heroes and villains use the market, I think the long-term trend in prices might not be a lot different than what would happen if you kept the markets separate and zeroed the hero one. On top of that, farming, TF access, teaming and other high-end effects on both drop supply and inf are about to become extremely equal opportunity. It'll be interesting to see what those normalizations do to the buying and selling habits of villains.

On thing that's very interesting to me is that when we've talked about market merges in the past, we've generally assumed that influence and infamy would still be separate pools, never meeting except via a merged market. This merger appears not to be like that: Inf will be able to be handed off cross-faction in co-op zones and email. Overall, I suspect that presents a massive shunt for most of the things people raised as economic concerns about the merger. I think that's a really great thing.

I'm excited about the whole deal.

Base salvage supply will take a HUGE hit, as I believe that most of what is currently listed is on ALTS that are not looked at frequently. High priced base salvage redside will take a hit as it is more common blueside (Verminous Victuals for example).

Of course, the base salvage market is not very big (at least not REDSIDE).

So last week really did happen and it wasn't a dream?

Honestly much better than the market merge for me is the ability to email across factions. The new merged market will be interesting but the shackles of side being removed is my truest glee in last week's announcement.

I just picked up a Soulbound Allegiance on hero side. I was thinking of just selling it, but after hearing the news I'm wondering if maybe I should wait to sell it since MM's will help to sweeten the demand. Thoughts?