The Merged Market First Month Trepidations/Predictions

1) List it on Aug 17th as soon as the serves come back up for too much.

2)

3) profit

Hmmm It never occurred to me that my Base Salvage bids would get wiped out. I'm glad I only have like 7 left (or so) to copy down.

And if they choose to use their merits on mid-level recipes. People tend to wait until 50 before spending merits. If any of this new incarnate stuff can be purchased with merits, it will exacerbate that problem.

Overall, I'm in the wild chaos camp. Merged markets, reset histories, all bids/items backed out, plus an expansion which is oriented towards creating new characters, plus some new rewards for high level characters, plus maybe a double xp weekend and a reactivation weekend not too far away I bet. It's going to be a wild ride.

Sadly, I'll be out of town when the mess hits and during the first weekend, so I won't be able to get any bids in or list anything. I suspect the winning move will be to put in lots of bids for half of what things are worth today on goods with high turnover, and then relist them for 90% of what they're worth today. High profit, high turnover. I'm just sorry I won't be around to try it.

How sure of this are we, Peter?

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Well the general lack of supply for recipes below level 50 (except for a handful of special ones like LotG) suggests that very few people are doing random rolls below level 50.

I recognise that, definitely. But what I am curious about is hether or not that's a function of people failing to roll as they level, or if most merit-generating tasks are being performed at 50, by 50s.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I agree. Another possibility is the under 50 crowd are keeping what they are getting either random rolling of direct purchase with merits.

I'm not sure how we can know what people are doing. We can only see what happens in the markets (boy I cannot wait to use the singular noun for that).

Im with you, I am buying as much as I can now while the prices are low. The prices come GR are going to skyrocket and they will stay there. Villainside won't be add as much as it will be taking from the market, so anticipate a huge boom in sales and prices not seen since AE was introduced.

No...peeps will need to come up with another reason for its semi-fail state! Give it a month or two and see

There won't be a "semi-fail state" for the BM, because it will not exist as a seperate entity from Wentworths. It won't be possible for blueside market to have it better than redside market, because marketwise there will no longer be sides.

Speaking for myself? Very sure.

Now there is a difference [maybe not an important difference for your purposes] between these statements:
1. "the markets are full of max level recipes because the level 50s are making all the recipes"
2. "People below 50 don't roll until they reach 50."

I can only gather data on #1, so for #2 I have only a moderate number of anecdotes, based on trying to get people to sell me sub-50 recipes and generating them myself.

* I ran a certain number of TF's- mostly during the US daytime, so more skewed towards hardcore players- but MOST of the people on the teams, who were not already 50, wanted to wait till 50 to roll their recipes.
* I have heard people in Atlas Park/Freedom discussing the common wisdom of the noob- which was, in this case, "wait till 50 to roll." It may be no wiser than "don't click on the boxes in the respec" but the urban legend is out there- that's the way to go.
* I have been told by people from whom I was trying to buy merits, "I'm waiting till 50" or "Why would you want recipes below 50?" or "That's a waste of money."
* I've never heard anyone,ever, explain how they were going to, or someone else should, roll at anything other than 50.

It is clear that the vast majority of recipes are generated at level 50. I will assume that hardly anyone buys Perfect Zinger: Taunt/Rech, and that people do not care what level they get it - feel free to discuss this assumption.

If this assumption is correct, then the ratio of "bought at 50" to the ratio of "Bought below 50" should match the ratio of rolls at 50 to rolls below 50.

There are 13 recipes for sale at 50, and the last 5 cover the 27th of June to present
There are 19 from 41-49, last 5 tend to have sold from about 5/1 to the present. So 5 sales at 50 in 2 days, 40 sales 41-49 in the last, roughly, 60 days.
There are 2 for sale from 31-40, last 5 vary from June 1 to (in one case) Feb. 2nd. Maybe 5/1 on average. So 50 sales in the last, roughly, 60 days.
There are 6 for sale 21-30, with quite a lot of last 5 sales in the march-april range. (worst case is September 2009...) So 50 sales in the last, roughly, 90 days.

I conclude that, at least for the recipes sold, you sell about 1.5 per day from 21 to 49 and about 2.5 per day at level 50.

It might be good to a factor of 5, that estimating technique, but I wouldn't trust it further. Maybe Stealths, where there's enough of a market that you can actually trust the IO is used or sold?

10 for sale at 50
2 for sale 16-49
3 for sale at level 15
Last 5 sold at 15 since 6/23 (roughly 5 in 5 days)
Last 5 sold at 16-25 -one level has 5 in the last 2 months, most of the rest go back into mid to late 2009. 50 in the last 200+ days.
Last 5 from 26-35 - typically around February or March. Call it 50 in the last 90 days.
Last 5 from 36-45 - "more reasonable", around april maybe. 50 in the last 60 days.
Last 5 from 46-49: 15 in the last, say, 90 days.
Last 5 at 50 since yesterday

We pretend that all these were rolled, even the level 15s, and conclude that we have 2.5 sold per day at 50, 1 a day at 15, and roughly 1.5 a day at 16-49 .

So we have as much business at 50 as we do at 15-49 and approximately half the IO's rolled are at level 50. If we take out the bump at 15 (people buying with merits) we get roughly the same 2.5/1.5 ratio.

So around 65% of [sold] rare recipes are generated by level 50's. Now there are many things throwing that off- farmers tend to have a completed build, be picking up 50's, and to occasionally get a rare recipe from a boss- but that still says most of the rolls are done by and for 50's.

Discuss.

Yup.

Is this sarcasm? I expect prices to go up due to more players playing level 50s. I expect the Incarnate system to encourage more level 50 play. Level 50s earn more Inf.

However, I don't expect prices to rise significantly higher than they are now on whichever side is highest because "Villains". Why would people start paying more for something when prices are relatively stable on both sides? For example, if prices of LotG: 7.5%s are stable at 160 on Blueside and 205 on redside (making a guesstimation) are you saying prices would go higher than 205? Why would that happen? Supply and Demand have found equilibrium Redside at that price. Why are villains, or heroes, suddenly going to desire the same amount, or more, at a higher price? Is the supply going to disappear?

Word.

I'm not sure if I am explaining myself correctly, I beleive that due to the lower population red side there will not be as much supply coming from them as it will be more from blue side and due to having characters with more unspent INF the prices will be driven higher than what the equilibrium is currently at. Of course I can be wrong but that is my prediction.

Well, yes, there is an important difference in that the former is observation and the latter is conjecture.

I do not disagree at all that the data supportrs a (massive?) bias towards 50s producing material. I have no qualms about that at all. But aside from urban myth and anecdote (which I am reluctant to trust), I don't have any good idea as to the motivation behind it.

Plus, from where I sit, only rolling at 50 is a wasteful or stupid process - as is rolling all the way up. Both of these behaviours make me wonder, because I'm curious about the why. If you design the right incentive plan, you can influence behaviour, but you need to understand the behaviour along the way.

Anyway, I didn't want to say 'you're wrong,' but rather, ask 'why do you think that's right,' so don't take me as arguing here, but rather, asking.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

the motivation is simple- 50 is where the most egregious profits are to be had, so that's where the efficient players congregate.

Combine with 50 being where your character is at the peak of their effectiveness and bob's your uncle.

I've been running various characters through my fave MA farm map to see how they compare to each other. Some of them are sub-50. The flood of recipes thus generated moves MUCH faster at 50 than it does at any of the lower level ranges.

Anyone interested in profits would have to notice the same thing.

The key aspect is production of items/inf per person. Will the average villain now make relatively more Inf than items than they do now? Why will it change? Why the "unspent Inf"? One can simply mail it to themselves. Perhaps what you mean to say is "people will be abandoning higher level characters with piles of money and this influx of money will drive prices higher"?

I don't expect a significant amount of abandoned toons and money from abondoned toons hitting the market.
I cannot fathom why in a post merger in a Going Rogue world Villains would be producing more Inf and less items.

there will be no more "sides" in a merged market, everyone will be in the same boat.


Triumph generates less junk than Freedom, but the market doesn't care because it's a shared pool of supply.

Where do you get the belief that villains have more unspent inf? I sell things redside all the time, and it looks to me like villains are spending inf. In fact, the impatient villains are probably spending even more inf than heroes, since "buy it now" blueside translates to "buy it today" redside, and a "buy it today" price blueside might translate to "buy it this week" redside. All relative to the average "going rate" of the item of course...which also often fluctuates far more widely redside, so the "buy it now" villain may have to bid way more than their blueside counterpart.