City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Question about in game economy

Adeon Hawkwood

By Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-07-18 22:52 in The Market and Inventions

 

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Originally Posted by seebs View Post
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.
This is one of the most controversial aspects of the auction house. Personally my opinion is that blind bidding and the ability to leave standing buy orders in place makes the market a lot more useful to someone with limited time although I would like to see more price history.

 

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I have nothing to add other than Goat is probably my fave market forum poster

/gignore @username is the best feature of this game. It's also probably the least used feature.
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Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn View Post
Hazy is right
Can't get enough Hazy? /chanjoin robo's lounge today!

 

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Originally Posted by Minotaur View Post
Depends if you view the recipe and the enhancement as the same item, I do, you don't.
Not to be too rude or anything but you're entitled to your wrong opinion.

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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.
Not if I vendor it, it won't!

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This is just terminology really, I consider buying, crafting, relisting (where I happen to make my cash these days) as all part of flipping.
Do you consider puking as part of eating?



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No I don't find it sad that he can't afford to pimp out his toon immediately, I find it sad that at 47 where he is now, he can't afford a single set of ToD let alone the several he needs.
As has been made nauseatingly clear. He does not need them. I wish people would stop using the N-word when talking about wants.

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He has 12M left having bought some of the cheap IOs (and even cheap rare IOs will cost 2.5M in most cases for a rare salvage, buying the recipe and level 40-50 crafting fee).
What's he got in the way of merits? Or did he PL up? If he's been generating merits the entire time, he could easily generate a couple hundred million in short order.

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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.
It's called "learning curve". And it's usually expensive.

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Flippers/crafters are not really a problem here, except that they take away the "patient bargains" on recipes.
BULL! Patience is not "I place a bid. Oh lookie! It filled already!"


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
This is one of the most controversial aspects of the auction house. Personally my opinion is that blind bidding and the ability to leave standing buy orders in place makes the market a lot more useful to someone with limited time although I would like to see more price history.
This will slightly stabilize "buy it nao" prices a bit. That's about all. It won't affect the prices paid by patient bidders one iota.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs View Post
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.
But if I made a bid for Brass at 501, then I'd ensure that I'd get it ahead of whomever is bidding 500 for it.

Well, until you make new bids at 502! But that just means I'll make newer bids at 503.

Until you make even newer bids at 504...

 

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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
This will slightly stabilize "buy it nao" prices a bit. That's about all. It won't affect the prices paid by patient bidders one iota.
Agreed, but it would make it easier for a patient bidder who doesn't follow the market to get an idea as to the true market value. My interest with this sort of thing is not reducing prices for the impatient it's reducing the knowledge gap for the patient.

 

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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
Agreed, but it would make it easier for a patient bidder who doesn't follow the market to get an idea as to the true market value. My interest with this sort of thing is not reducing prices for the impatient it's reducing the knowledge gap for the patient.
The problem is, the impatient won't really use the increased functionality.

They're going to look at however much the last few went for and go nuts bidding.


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Posted

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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
The problem is, the impatient won't really use the increased functionality.

They're going to look at however much the last few went for and go nuts bidding.
Yes I will.

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 View Post



No I don't find it sad that he can't afford to pimp out his toon immediately, I find it sad that at 47 where he is now, he can't afford a single set of ToD let alone the several he needs. He has 12M left having bought some of the cheap IOs (and even cheap rare IOs will cost 2.5M in most cases for a rare salvage, buying the recipe and level 40-50 crafting fee).

He made all the mistakes casual players make (as well as blowing tens of millions in Icon), sold recipes not enhancements etc.
Its clear you and I define need differently....

Regardless I refuse to have any sympathy for a level 47 Fire/Shield Scrapper not being able to afford all the IOs he can possibly want....really? Cant afford rare salvage? The AE is in virtually every zone...set diff to X8 +0 No bosses and go crazy. Theres an opportunity cost to teaming...salvage and drops, but this opportunity cost is not insurmountable.

 

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Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven View Post
But if I made a bid for Brass at 501, then I'd ensure that I'd get it ahead of whomever is bidding 500 for it.

Well, until you make new bids at 502! But that just means I'll make newer bids at 503.

Until you make even newer bids at 504...
But it turns out not to matter, because my bids at 500 get filled "soon enough" anyway. So I have no real reason to bid more.

The only time I care is if I'm in a hurry to make money, and haven't got much, in which case I go through the level 40 common recipes which are for sale, and bid 120x10 on all of them, selling the results to a vendor for 10-20k. Each.

 

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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
The problem is, the impatient won't really use the increased functionality.

They're going to look at however much the last few went for and go nuts bidding.
So what? I have zero interest whatsoever in helping the impatient. My interest is in lowering the barriers of entry to those who are willing to be patient. Currently someone who rarely uses the market might be perfectly patient but with only the last 5 sales to go on it can be very hard for someone who doesn't regularly use the market to know what the long term market price is. Providing more historical pricing info (even just small stuff like last 48 hour low and high sales) would allow someone with patience but a lack of info to make more informed pricing decisions thereby lowering the barrier to entry.

 

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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
So what? I have zero interest whatsoever in helping the impatient. My interest is in lowering the barriers of entry to those who are willing to be patient. Currently someone who rarely uses the market might be perfectly patient but with only the last 5 sales to go on it can be very hard for someone who doesn't regularly use the market to know what the long term market price is. Providing more historical pricing info (even just small stuff like last 48 hour low and high sales) would allow someone with patience but a lack of info to make more informed pricing decisions thereby lowering the barrier to entry.
Personally, I'd love more info as well.

However, I feel this would simply widen the gap between the marketers and the have-nots.

Granted, we have zero responsibility to them to provide them with nice things at 1 inf apiece. But, to be honest, the ******** is loud enough already.

Additionally, I'm not really sure the server they're using for market transactions could handle the additional data load. The market response times to pricing queries are horrific enough already.

While I don't know what hardware they're using to run the market, whatever they've got just ain't enough. I'd say more memory and a lower latency, higher throughput "disk" subsystem are in order.

Granted, the market purge/merge for i18 may help speed things up dramatically for a while.


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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
However, I feel this would simply widen the gap between the marketers and the have-nots.
I'm not convinced it would. More info would be useful to marketeers but most of the good ones already know pretty much what it would show. Conversely the have-nots who are actually willing to think and learn have a MUCH easier time doing so. plus when the whiners come here we can point to the graphs as evidence that they are wrong .

 

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A point of clarification. When I buy common salvage for a high price, it's not because that price is insignificant to my PvE earnings (although it is, somewhat). I buy it to craft a recipe sooner, and the difference between 500 inf and 100,000 inf is not a significant portion of the 1M+ inf I expect to gain through the overall transaction. I could wait to get the 500 inf brass, but then I'd be waiting to get the 1M from the crafted enhancement and meanwhile the bid would be taking up a market slot and the recipe would be taking up space in my inventory.

Of course if I'm planning on mass-producing something, I'll bid 500 on a stack of 10 and come back tomorrow. But I generally don't do that, because punching dudes for drops is more fun to me.

@SPTrashcan
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Posted

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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
I'm not convinced it would.
You have to consider effort loading. Some people are unsatisfied with the amount of effort they have to put in to our current market system to get what they see as a rewarding result. Those same people are not exactly about to clap for joy that a system gets put in place where they can put in even more effort for even more chance at reward.

The market is a skill-based reward scheme, and like Fury for brutes, it's something that some people just can't manage and find difficult, and some people manage so readily that they insist that there can't be anyone out there who'd find it difficult. Adding complexity is just going to reward the high-skilled players and punish the lower-skilled ones. Now, I'm all for a '**** the poor' attitude, but I don't think the developers have any real reason to give us more ridiculous piles of money.

 

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
I'm not convinced it would. More info would be useful to marketeers but most of the good ones already know pretty much what it would show. Conversely the have-nots who are actually willing to think and learn have a MUCH easier time doing so.
I'm not talking about people who simply haven't built themselves a wealth nest-egg yet. These people eventually become the "haves".

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plus when the whiners come here we can point to the graphs as evidence that they are wrong .
Since when has factual information and reasoned rebuttal ever stopped a jealous whiner?

Name me one instance.

Note: I will NOT be holding my breath in anticipation of an answer.


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Originally Posted by Talen Lee View Post
Those same people are not exactly about to clap for joy that a system gets put in place where they can put in even more effort for even more chance at reward.
I really don't understand your reasoning here. To me having more information on pricing history means less work, not more. Currently if I want to know the pricing on items that sell more than 5 a day my only recourse is to leave bids overnight and see what happens. Plus I have to remember this information. If more historical information is available I can simply look at that to see what it is rather than needing to test and remember it myself.

 

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Historically, the developers could generally be relied on to favorably consider changes that, in their view, reduce the skill requirements for some niche activity, in the hope that participation will increase.

Historically, the results have been... mixed.

In other cases I have advocated bribery as an alternative method to improve participation. But everyone who can be induced with bribes is already marketeering. It would be nice if the developers took a more hands-off approach here, merged the markets and then waited to see how it worked out. But the developers are not scientists - they have a tendency to confound their own experiments by changing multiple variables at a time. I would not be surprised to see many economic measures implemented concurrently with the market change, and the landscape shifting wildly as a result - not necessarily toward anything resembling the developers' intention, either.

@SPTrashcan
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Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan View Post
A point of clarification. When I buy common salvage for a high price, it's not because that price is insignificant to my PvE earnings (although it is, somewhat). I buy it to craft a recipe sooner, and the difference between 500 inf and 100,000 inf is not a significant portion of the 1M+ inf I expect to gain through the overall transaction. I could wait to get the 500 inf brass, but then I'd be waiting to get the 1M from the crafted enhancement and meanwhile the bid would be taking up a market slot and the recipe would be taking up space in my inventory.

Of course if I'm planning on mass-producing something, I'll bid 500 on a stack of 10 and come back tomorrow. But I generally don't do that, because punching dudes for drops is more fun to me.

Precisely. If I'm crafting an IO that brings in 500 million inf, I'm not going to pussyfoot around to make sure I'm paying only 2.1 million for components instead of 2.5 million. Profit differential of less than 1/10th of 1%?

I can leverage 500 million a lot harder than I can 400K.


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Posted

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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
I really don't understand your reasoning here. To me...
You've refined the skills.

Are you familiar with the term 'aspirational item,' and the way that people handle a variety of prices for similar objects?

 

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Originally Posted by UberGuy View Post
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.
I'm earning it for stuff I can't buy yet.
My main, for whom I spare no expense, is /regen. I'm waiting for purple healing and resistance sets.


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Originally Posted by Hazygreys View Post
I have nothing to add other than Goat is probably my fave market forum poster
hmm.... dunno if he's my favorite, but he has a clue and a sense of humor.

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Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect View Post
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.
There's no waste if there's fun had making it.
As the preacher said of real life:
"... vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

 

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Originally Posted by Talen Lee View Post
Are you familiar with the term 'aspirational item,'
Nope, and wikipedia does not seem to want to enlighten me

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and the way that people handle a variety of prices for similar objects?
Well according to basic economic theory they will always buy the cheapest one of suitable quality. Of course real people tend to buy them the one that best suits their needs which includes price, quality, time to acquire and whether it is better than the one owned by their neighbors/friends/coworkers/family. For us price and time to acquire are the only really relevant facotrs.

 

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Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect View Post
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.
Well in a game with a player based free market, economics happens. Don't forget it's a science with theories and laws first derived by observation of markets. You have an open market place, rules of supply, demand and inflation happen all by themselves.

Sounds like you simply want a classic RPG store where you can go and upgrade to the latest, bestest gear you can afford. Problem is the devs didn't give us that, they gave us a free market system, a method to obtain supply and what we are seeing are simply the natural result of a free market, a low supply rate and an every growing money supply.

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I think players coming from a WoW like MMO, where if you do raid X enough times you are going to get the epic drop that our purely random chance system is simply too tedious. Then there is the difference between the market systems.

WoW also uses an auction house. So while the seller may have a minimum acceptable price, it's up to the buyers to home in on the fair market value and pay no more. With a consignment house, it's simply the first bid meeting or is over the asking price that wins. And with only the last five transactions shown, which can be from the same one buy offer but filled from five sellers, it can quickly hide the fair price simply because one player is in a hurry, has a lot of inf and doesn't need to be frugal.

So the combination of how our "leet" loot is acquired and how our open market system works can frustrate those crossing over (or back) from other MMOs where the time sinks are reasonably predictable and the markets are more informative.

Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas View Post
Sounds like you simply want a classic RPG store where you can go and upgrade to the latest, bestest gear you can afford. Problem is the devs didn't give us that, they gave us a free market system, a method to obtain supply and what we are seeing are simply the natural result of a free market, a low supply rate and an every growing money supply.
Even this example doesn't hold up: Sticking to something fairly popular - Final Fantasy - when was the last time you went to a store and bought a Masamune? Muramase? Genji (whatever)? Heck, in many of them, even fairly basic items, like Ribbons and Ethers require grinding for a lucky drop or completing some side quest.

The best equipment is always in limited supply, and requis jumping through hoops to get, or some kind of extraordinary luck. Fortunately, this game lets you pick the hoop you want to jump through, so you can use the one you find easiest.

@Roderick