Question about in game economy
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-07-18 22:52 in The Market and Inventions
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Originally Posted by Minotaur
Flippers make the in game economy more like the real world economy. In the earlyish period of the market, I used to get to level 6, and place my (ridiculous lowball) bids for a load of unique IOs. By the time I hit level 32 2 or 3 weeks later and wanted to slot them, I'd bought most of them (I never paid more than 500K and rarely more than 200K for a steadfast res/def for example, a friend got all 3 of the big healing uniques for like 10M total). If you want a nice brand new car and only want to pay $100, you're likely to be SoL in real life, but before the flippers arrived, you could get that sort of bargain in game if you had a modicum of patience. A large part of the inflation and supply shortage has come with AE. That has distorted the drops significantly, and particularly the level of the recipes/enhs that turn up. Also it has decreased the amount of rare salvage that hits the market, as if you're trying to make cash then bronze rolling is better than rare salvage. It's much worse in the days of exploits when toons are going 1-50 very rapidly and not generating much stuff, but then wanting full IO builds. |
There is actually a much simpler explanation for the change. The game population has been in decline and whats left is the hardcore. People with lots of inf and many potential outlets to sell an item don't need to let it go on the cheap because they need the money. Second the addition of merits means no one has to take random recipes at random levels. People can save their merits to buy items that they can price well and at level points where there is real competition for them.
At the height of the AE exploits rare salvage was incredibly plentiful. I made billions buying just about all tier 2 and tier 3 rare salvage for around 200k and selling for a million plus. (Yes flippers don't raise prices lol /sarcasm). Every day it would be log in collect what I had bought relist place another set of bids and I could usually do that twice a day. So AE isn't drying up the salvage supply, people just seem to be less willing to sell their recipes as recipes and are instead crafting them, and selling the crafted item for higher price. Once again consistent with game winnowing down to a hardcore.
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Originally Posted by Minotaur
Frogfather, that's one of the most patronising replies I've ever seen, it is partially correct, but not entirely.
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If that cracks your top 1% of patronizing posts you not on here enough. Regardless, DarkCurrent probably didnt deserve my level of vitriol and for that I apologize...
I do fail to see how your reply disagreed with mine even one iota though...
Youre saying game economy differs from the real world doesnt detract from the point that supply and demand are still the major forces moving this market. The lack of any real expense means 100% of the players income is placed on the "discretionary" side of the ledger makes those supply and demand swings a lot wider than the real world but its the same basic forces. I will agree that theres differing factors at work between the real world and game world but its the same principle and once thats understood it becomes kind of easy to use the market. Its a tool, not an enigma.
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can we please dispense with the attribution of magical powers to the all-powerful "flippers".|
Originally Posted by Minotaur
If you want a nice brand new car and only want to pay $100, you're likely to be SoL in real life, but before the flippers arrived, you could get that sort of bargain in game if you had a modicum of patience.
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you could get crazy deals early on mostly because nobody really knew what they were doing. As more players figured out what 'the good stuff' was, ridiculous deals dried up because the pool of buyers grew, not because magic flippers were exercising their psychic domination over the playerbase. I specifically remember a couple of people going on here about how ridiculously underpriced Karma -KBs were for what the did. Yeah they could buy them cheap, but the couldn't sell them for what they were "worth" because nobody was buying. Prices didn't rise until a lot more players figured out what some marketeers already knew.
Flippers were part of the equation, but pretending everyone existed in a low price utopia until those mean flippers came along is pure comedy.
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My City Was Gone
I dunno, the first day of the market I knew someone who was buying level 50 generic IO recipes on the market for, like, 1000 inf as fast as she could put the bids down and run to the vendor and back.
That was pretty utopian for her. I had the insane popcorn-eating issue where I was buying common salvage for 10 inf each and selling it for 250 inf and I _could not stop_ . It was free money, lying there! Even though I worked out the math [while running back and forth and back and forth] and the money was really really low... I had a Depression Era grandparent yelling in the back of my brain. You take the free money.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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Um, I'm not entirely clear how BOTH of these things can be true. If there are zero bids, how can someone buy up underpriced supply as it comes to the market? |
Originally Posted by DarkCurrent
There a plenty of examples of salvage for which there are hundreds of them in stock and there are ZERO bids, yet the minimum price is thousands of inf.
[snip] there are more like 10 sellers with 100 alchemical golds each that control that market and buy up any of the 'under priced' supply with the dozens of standing orders they have placed. |
Perhaps regular buyers have bought all the cheap Alchemical Gold that was for sale at low prices, and all thats left is people who took a chance and listed them for a high price, just in case someone really wanted one? Or can you think of another explanation thats consistent with zero bids, but the cheapest one being that high?
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OK, I just checked the market. I'm assuming your use of Alchemical Gold was just pulling a name out of a hat, as there is currently an excess of demand for that.|
Originally Posted by DarkCurrent
There a plenty of examples of salvage for which there are hundreds of them in stock and there are ZERO bids, yet the minimum price is thousands of inf. There's no way you can convince me that there are 1000 sellers out there all wanting at least 10,000 infamy for an alchemical gold. No, instead there are more like 10 sellers with 100 alchemical golds each that control that market and buy up any of the 'under priced' supply with the dozens of standing orders they have placed.
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However, Demonic threat reports do fit your figures. 8k selling 38 bids last 5 were 10k 1inf 10k 10k 10k.
I bid 50, 500 and 1001 and the 1001 filled instantly, and since then there has also been sales of 2k and 5k.
I have left the 50 and 500 over night and will see if they are filled tomorrow. I'm willing to bet they have.
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Originally Posted by Scientist
Um, I'm not entirely clear how BOTH of these things can be true. If there are zero bids, how can someone buy up underpriced supply as it comes to the market?
Perhaps regular buyers have bought all the cheap Alchemical Gold that was for sale at low prices, and all thats left is people who took a chance and listed them for a high price, just in case someone really wanted one? Or can you think of another explanation thats consistent with zero bids, but the cheapest one being that high? |
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Hey, I did all those things too!|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
I dunno, the first day of the market I knew someone who was buying level 50 generic IO recipes on the market for, like, 1000 inf as fast as she could put the bids down and run to the vendor and back.
That was pretty utopian for her. I had the insane popcorn-eating issue where I was buying common salvage for 10 inf each and selling it for 250 inf and I _could not stop_ . It was free money, lying there! Even though I worked out the math [while running back and forth and back and forth] and the money was really really low... I had a Depression Era grandparent yelling in the back of my brain. You take the free money. |
We were like a bunch of hostages liberated from a summer fat camp and dropped off at Dunkin' Doughnuts.
It took me a while to realize that the 'bad old days' of scrimping and saving were over, even after I started selling drops for OMGWTFBBQ prices like *gasp* 50,000 inf!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I don't even know how many months I spent leaving bids up for stacks of generic 30 and 35 recipes. I was making like 100K per stack, selling those to vendors!
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Well buying significantly underpriced common IO recipes and sell them at a store is a viable strategy that I use on characters who I haven't played since before the market came out, it was a way to juice their inf and allow me to start IOing them.
Flippers may affect the price of items but without the growing amount of inf in the game, all they are doing is zeroing in on the optimal value. Unless of course you believe that there are cartels that control the market for certain key pieces of salvage or recipes and are fixing their price artificially high.
Yes, the pre-market inf sinks weren't all that effective once you got past level 35 or so. But with nothing else to spend it on, it didn't really matter. That's why when the markets first opened we had Fairy Wings recipes going for 500,000 inf. They were rare and players had characters sitting on a pile of unspent inf. The bright side this redistributed some of the inf to anyone lucky enough to get a popular drop.
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You're completely missing the point. A lot of people used to, and as far as I know still do post at a very low price to get a quick sale for badges or to free up slots (and I'm not talking in this case about the really desirable items, think harmonised healing/serendipity etc). The numbers in the next paragraph are plucked out the air but give the sense of what I found.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
can we please dispense with the attribution of magical powers to the all-powerful "flippers".
you could get crazy deals early on mostly because nobody really knew what they were doing. As more players figured out what 'the good stuff' was, ridiculous deals dried up because the pool of buyers grew, not because magic flippers were exercising their psychic domination over the playerbase. I specifically remember a couple of people going on here about how ridiculously underpriced Karma -KBs were for what the did. Yeah they could buy them cheap, but the couldn't sell them for what they were "worth" because nobody was buying. Prices didn't rise until a lot more players figured out what some marketeers already knew. Flippers were part of the equation, but pretending everyone existed in a low price utopia until those mean flippers came along is pure comedy. |
I've previously posted several examples of this but I suspect the forum purge has eaten them, the sort of thing would be an IO where at levels 35-40 there are no recipes for sale, all the last 5 sales are bought at 323456 (with the very odd higher one where somebody's come in with a separate bid from outside) and there are 20 crafted IOs for sale across those levels with a last 5 all around 10M. If that sort of thing is not evidence of a flipper I don't know what is. These are the sort of thing that pre flippers you could pick up for 20K and I did.
I also wasn't talking just about the very early days of the market, I was picking up a lot of stuff really cheap (to use not to sell) for maybe 18 months afterwards (and yes I made billions in the really early days vendoring common IOs too). The change I feel was that most people (like I did) mainly bought IOs to slot in the early days, rather than to sell, so you'd bid for one and leave bargains for other people rather than bidding for 10 and selling on.
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| Flippers may affect the price of items but without the growing amount of inf in the game, all they are doing is zeroing in on the optimal value |
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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So true! I totally agree that this is one of the main "problems" behind the economy.
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Originally Posted by je_saist
Which is where we get to the real big technical issue with the Auction House. Auction houses work great in games where players only have one or two avatars, and where they outlevel that avatar's gear on a regular basis and can resell it as "used"
Auction Houses don't work so well in a game that encourage players to have lots of avatars and where items generally cannot be resold. The item generation has never been rebalanced against character creation. The reason why there wasn't a problem on SO's is that SO's can be |
Originally Posted by Megajoule
We're being invaded. Again. This time, instead of aliens, zombies, or eyeballs with teeth, it's the marching band.
Then there are the people that don't want to study economics in order to play a video game.
I fall into that category. I play the game to be a superhero, not a stockbroker. Having an in-depth understanding of supply and demand should in no way ever be required just to buy or sell somethng in a market found within a video game.
It's a GAME, people. The people who are going on and on about the market (on both sides) are taking the whole thing too damn seriously.
You are not entitled to have the best stuff on every single character you have just because you want it. It has been established that IOs were never meant to be the baseline, and they are not required to play the game. You don't need them, you want them, and there is nothing anywhere that says you deserve to have them.
On the flip side, there is no reason at all to be obsessed with earning inf beyond what you need to outfit the characters you have. When the servers shut down (as they eventually will), all that effort you went to in order to be the guy with the most stuff will have been completely wasted, as the stuff will no longer exist.
So, in short, I guess what I'm saying is: Stop complaining that stuff is too expensive, and stop taking advantage of peoples' impatience to make stacks of money you don't need.
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately. |
Minotaur said:
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... and when I was trying to make a point by frankenslotting a level 50 for 6 million (5.5 million of which came from the respec) that was relevant. To me. |
You're completely missing the point. A lot of people used to, and as far as I know still do post at a very low price to get a quick sale for badges or to free up slots (and I'm not talking in this case about the really desirable items, think harmonised healing/serendipity etc). The numbers in the next paragraph are plucked out the air but give the sense of what I found. I've previously posted several examples of this but I suspect the forum purge has eaten them, the sort of thing would be an IO where at levels 35-40 there are no recipes for sale, all the last 5 sales are bought at 323456 (with the very odd higher one where somebody's come in with a separate bid from outside) and there are 20 crafted IOs for sale across those levels with a last 5 all around 10M. If that sort of thing is not evidence of a flipper I don't know what is. These are the sort of thing that pre flippers you could pick up for 20K and I did. |
It's not relevant any more, to anyone. If you sell all your salvage and recipes for 1 inf you will still make more than 93 million by the time you hit level 50. You have 93 slots. If you have to buy your recipes for (323456 + 1) you'll still be fine.
If at some point you're squeezed- say you've just hit 27, you didn't plan ahead and you're scooping up 1.5 million of SO's- you can make a million in an hour doing garbage collection- picking up level 41-44 yellow recipes and dropping them off at a vendor. Or doing AE missions until you can afford an orange salvage of your choice.
With ten minutes of education, there is no difference between 20K and 320K.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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You heard the man. Stop having fun, guys. Cut it out. He doesn't enjoy it, so you shouldn't either. |
Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
stop taking advantage of peoples' impatience to make stacks of money you don't need.
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(Not much of a marketeer myself, but I'm also not here to tell people how to have fun...)
@SPTrashcan
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Even on the market forum, very few people have claimed to use the market to earn inf for the sake of having it. Just about everyone earns inf for the sake of buying stuff they want.|
Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
On the flip side, there is no reason at all to be obsessed with earning inf beyond what you need to outfit the characters you have. When the servers shut down (as they eventually will), all that effort you went to in order to be the guy with the most stuff will have been completely wasted, as the stuff will no longer exist.
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That said, the very concept of "buying stuff you want" gets into some complicated territory on motivation. This game is stateful, as all MMOs are. There's a past that covers how you got to your current state, and there's a tomorrow that includes your unachieved goals. If you plan to earn your spending needs in advance, then by definition you will be storing wealth ahead of that spending. If you are doing that well enough in advance, you recognize that your stored wealth is subject to valuation changes due to changes in the market, and so you might store more wealth, in case it devalues. Finally, you might decide to save wealth for "rainy day" spending. For example, when the Blessing of the Zephyr change landed, I was able to turn right around and buy a PvP 3% Defense unique to enable a respec that retained most of my +Defense, because I had contingency wealth on hand.
So there are actually "play the game" motivations for earning a lot of wealth in game. I know for me, having a lot of wealth empowers a playstyle I really enjoy. Like you, I think, my goal is to log in and beat stuff up. At the same time, I do get a kick out of making a good profit or feeling like I got something for a bargain. For me, the combination is win-win.
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| So, in short, I guess what I'm saying is: Stop complaining that stuff is too expensive, and stop taking advantage of peoples' impatience to make stacks of money you don't need. |
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
I think the economy and market in this game are fairly simple. I've never studied economy and have no interest in real life economy and I still make good profit in the in-game market. As you guys have said, it's just a game and games generally are simple.
Most of my characters are very well equipped meaning IO sets, even rares and some might even have the "cheap purples". I play the market to earn influence in order to play the game as I like to: being able to build a character that does "impossible" things, you know, like superheroes do.
With that said, I don't think any economical studies are needed in order to make the most (or at least a lot) out of the market. In the end, IOs compare quite well to similar situations in real life: you'd like a Lamborghini, but in the end you can get from place A to place B on foot or on a bike or a moderately priced car. It won't be as fast or as "cool", but it'll do the trick.
- @DSorrow - alts on Union and Freedom mostly -
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It's not really relevant to me any more unless I want to build something silly (7BN dominator build or similar) or want things like the 2BN+ PvP IO. I'm marketeering much more gently these days and making only maybe 100M a day.|
Originally Posted by Fulmens
Minotaur said:
... and when I was trying to make a point by frankenslotting a level 50 for 6 million (5.5 million of which came from the respec) that was relevant. To me. It's not relevant any more, to anyone. If you sell all your salvage and recipes for 1 inf you will still make more than 93 million by the time you hit level 50. You have 93 slots. If you have to buy your recipes for (323456 + 1) you'll still be fine. If at some point you're squeezed- say you've just hit 27, you didn't plan ahead and you're scooping up 1.5 million of SO's- you can make a million in an hour doing garbage collection- picking up level 41-44 yellow recipes and dropping them off at a vendor. Or doing AE missions until you can afford an orange salvage of your choice. With ten minutes of education, there is no difference between 20K and 320K. |
Where it hit home to me was somebody who'd been playing the game a couple of weeks who just joined our SG a week or so ago. He's an experienced MMO player, and pretty competent already on his 47 fire/shield scrapper, but clearly what he doesn't have is in game cash. He had reached level 30 ish before he joined us, and had no clue how to make cash. He then had a subsequent avoidable disaster where he spent most of his cash saving costume designs in Icon not realising this cost inf
I put together something softcapped and not totally excessive in terms of what it used, the only thing in it that would cost 40M+ would be the oblit quad, but he's a million miles away from being able to afford things like the touch of deaths and the other oblits. Too many things that even for a year or two after I9 were available for relative peanuts are costing 5-10M each for the recipe.
Where the problem really appears is that I play with a group of people who enjoy levelling their toons in a large team social setting. This is very bad for your inf generation but good for your XP. If you're playing in an 8 man team at +3, you will get a lot less drops per XP earned than somebody either playing at 50 or levelling solo. I have 53 level 50s now, none really PLd but once they get to 50 I move on and play something else most of the time as farming bores me, so I have to marketeer to make my inf. Some people came to the game to kill things rather than play accountant, and also to play in teams, they will really suffer for inf.
Most of the trials along the lines of "I just sold what I dropped and had 200 million inf at 50" I suspect were done solo and with a lot more drops than many people get.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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I addressed the point you made.|
Originally Posted by Minotaur
You're completely missing the point.
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| I've previously posted several examples of this but I suspect the forum purge has eaten them, the sort of thing would be an IO where at levels 35-40 there are no recipes for sale, all the last 5 sales are bought at 323456 (with the very odd higher one where somebody's come in with a separate bid from outside) and there are 20 crafted IOs for sale across those levels with a last 5 all around 10M. If that sort of thing is not evidence of a flipper I don't know what is. |
Flipping is the purchase of an item for re-listing at a higher price point.
Buying a recipe and salvage and making it isn't flipping, its crafting.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I enjoy these threads.
Allow me to add the following:
Last Thursday and Friday thanks to gleemail I spent 1.5B purpling one of my level 50 controllers.
I cannot wait until next month when my 4B in infamy could have also been brought to bear in the market. As I always ask, what else am I supposed to do with my inf?
Now as to this new player sticker shock. How is it the new player decided to see what a PvP IO or purple or LotG cost in the first place as opposed to say some cheap piece of salvage? How did we go from the horror of 50k Luck Charms being so horrible to talking about the best of the best IOs in the past few years?
I find it all one big joke. Now if you will all excuse me I have to go back to playing the characters I enjoy and accumulating yet more inf which I will eventually use to buy all that I want when I want it (that is at "outrageous" prices).
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Originally Posted by Minotaur
Where it hit home to me was somebody who'd been playing the game a couple of weeks who just joined our SG a week or so ago. He's an experienced MMO player, and pretty competent already on his 47 fire/shield scrapper, but clearly what he doesn't have is in game cash. He had reached level 30 ish before he joined us, and had no clue how to make cash. He then had a subsequent avoidable disaster where he spent most of his cash saving costume designs in Icon not realising this cost inf I put together something softcapped and not totally excessive in terms of what it used, the only thing in it that would cost 40M+ would be the oblit quad, but he's a million miles away from being able to afford things like the touch of deaths and the other oblits. Too many things that even for a year or two after I9 were available for relative peanuts are costing 5-10M each for the recipe. |
The player in this discussion has been playing a couple of weeks and you think its sad he cant afford top-end IOs? ToDs, Oblits, etc cost that much because people want them. People that want them pay Inf for them. This has nothing to do with flippers but with people wanting things to smack things better.
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Originally Posted by Minotaur
Most of the trials along the lines of "I just sold what I dropped and had 200 million inf at 50" I suspect were done solo and with a lot more drops than many people get.
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Why is this a bad thing? He's level 30. He's new to the game. Why does he need a softcapped build? Why are you suggesting he should rush into that? Just because existing vets already have things like it?|
Originally Posted by Minotaur
It's not really relevant to me any more unless I want to build something silly (7BN dominator build or similar) or want things like the 2BN+ PvP IO. I'm marketeering much more gently these days and making only maybe 100M a day.
Where it hit home to me was somebody who'd been playing the game a couple of weeks who just joined our SG a week or so ago. He's an experienced MMO player, and pretty competent already on his 47 fire/shield scrapper, but clearly what he doesn't have is in game cash. He had reached level 30 ish before he joined us, and had no clue how to make cash. He then had a subsequent avoidable disaster where he spent most of his cash saving costume designs in Icon not realising this cost inf I put together something softcapped and not totally excessive in terms of what it used, the only thing in it that would cost 40M+ would be the oblit quad, but he's a million miles away from being able to afford things like the touch of deaths and the other oblits. Too many things that even for a year or two after I9 were available for relative peanuts are costing 5-10M each for the recipe. |
There are multiple ways to earn such rare equipment in this game. I do agree that not all of them are team friendly, and I don't necessarily agree with the degree that this is so. That said, I think you're making a mountain (or at least a much taller hill) out of a molehill with this particular example, because I just don't see the issue it's supposed to illustrate as representing a real problem.
By the way:
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| Some people came to the game to kill things rather than play accountant, and also to play in teams, they will really suffer for inf. |
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Depends if you view the recipe and the enhancement as the same item, I do, you don't. The usable item is the enhancement, you can't actually use the recipe, so the recipe is going to end up as the enhancement eventually. This is just terminology really, I consider buying, crafting, relisting (where I happen to make my cash these days) as all part of flipping.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
I addressed the point you made.
That's clear. Flipping is the purchase of an item for re-listing at a higher price point. Buying a recipe and salvage and making it isn't flipping, its crafting. |
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Originally Posted by Frogfather
The player in this discussion has been playing a couple of weeks and you think its sad he cant afford top-end IOs? ToDs, Oblits, etc cost that much because people want them. People that want them pay Inf for them. This has nothing to do with flippers but with people wanting things to smack things better.
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He made all the mistakes casual players make (as well as blowing tens of millions in Icon), sold recipes not enhancements etc.
Flippers/crafters are not really a problem here, except that they take away the "patient bargains" on recipes. Also many crafters take away the bargain crafted IOs by putting in low bids on the IOs they craft to hoover them up and relist.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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I disagree, simply because the WoW auction house is a lot more stable, and players tend to have lots of avatars (though not as many as CoH), and 99% of the gear you ever equip can never be resold.|
Originally Posted by je_saist
Auction Houses don't work so well in a game that encourage players to have lots of avatars and where items generally cannot be resold.
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The big difference is, you can see all the asking prices, not just the five most recent sales.
I think CoH's "bidding" concept is neat, but the net effect is that you have no way of guessing what a market price for an item is.
I don't think reselling would help much; I think the underlying issue is that you tend to end up with a ton of spare inf if you go around farming or questing, making it unrewarding to pay much attention to market prices. WoW has the same problem, there; prices are largely dictated by the needs of people with multiple raiding 80s.
As to flipping: I do a ton of flipping in WoW. Less so in CoH, because I can't post 500-600 auctions at once.
I have seen no evidence that this generally increases prices, and indeed, it by definition reduces the total amount of money around in the game (because every repost costs listing fees, and every purchase takes gold out of the game for the AH's cut). What it does do is stabilize prices a bit. I can turn something from "some days there's one for 200g, some days there's one for 15000g, some days there's none at all" into "nearly every day, there's one for 8000g". Not many people will buy it at that price, but if you really want one, there's probably one available. This keeps things more predictable. People who want to get something today get it today. People who want to liquidate supplies today get to liquidate supplies today. I get pocket change I can use to equip characters. Everyone's happy.
I've done a fair bit of flipping of brass at WW. I typically leave a bid open at 500 inf, and have a few posted for sale at maybe 100k-200k. Both the bids and the sales go through. Am I raising the real price of brass? Not really. If you want to buy brass for 500, go ahead and put in a bid at 500, your chances are as good as mine, and you will get your brass after a few hours or a couple of days. If you are in a hurry to get brass and simply don't care (200k inf is less than you make sneezing in the general direction of some critters), it has no significant effect on you. Since there's no meaning or relevance to the "average" price, it's not clear that I'm significantly affecting the market, apart from reducing the total amount of inf in it by about 10-20k every time someone buys one of the high-priced brass.
Minotaur:
The Heal Uniques are a legitimate point, though.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.