Introduce a new supply vein to WW/BM

How about setting a max bid cap (suppose at 1B) and simply have the system supply the item if you care to bid the cap?

This would flush inf out of the system from the top.

I have some meager thought behind this idea... will share if there's interest.

I still think tying this to market activity is the wrong way to do it. What is already selling we don't need more of.

Market seeding might have a place, but there needs to be another way to determine what to seed.

While I was thinking about the potential effect of a "lunch hour seeding" (every PVP IO at level 50 and every purple, one of each- something a Dev could do on their lunch hour, and we'd never know it) I realized a potential downside to this.

If you make a dev tool that allows you to add recipes to the game on the live servers, there is the possibility that the keenest of your 100,000 players would be able to find a way to use it as well. (they managed to turn one recipe into ten crafted at one point, early on...)

I suppose in the same way that the devs can log into the live game with a character with every power, they can log in with a character holding lots of recipes, but still... it's a potential danger.

I was thinking something more like the scripts they use to auto level people - something they can turn on to post things for sale and then turn off before reopening the servers. Servers come up and sales are made.

The idea of what to seed is the hardest question about this - the 20% of volume sales for the week is just a starting point. The devs could obviously also seed items that are determined to be 'under-supplied' .

People are trying to solve at least two distinct problems with this, it is true.
Problem 1: Inflation
Problem 2: Undersupply of My Favorite Recipe

Any others that are getting rolled in here?

My goal with this suggestion is a two birds, one stone approach. I believe it was a failing of the devs to not have some supply generated by the market itself from the start. Add in the fact that players don't list every drop they get and don't play all of the content across all level ranges in equal amounts and you will get lack of supply on various things as well as inflation.

Well as someone who rarely plays his 50(s) I try to buy my I/Os at 35 to 40. I mainly do this because I spend more time playing from 40 to 50 then I ever will at 50 so I get to enjoy them and get the bonuses when I can actually use them and not when I am unlikely to play them.

I know I am preaching to the choir, but it is pretty tough to I/O a character at 40. Even if you aren't getting the shiniest of the shiny, it can be brutal.

So whatever can be done to get some supply between 20 and 40, I'm for.

How about taking everything that has been sitting in storage in a base for over 60 days and auto posting it to the market for 5 inf? All proceeds go towards building BaB's summer house in the British Virgin Islands.

Some sort of mass welfare like this (in my opinion) would solve a lot of the things that people complain about on this forum!

If you started listing items out of base storage at 60-days people would just store items on alts they don't play. You haven't added any positive functionality and made the game more of a nuisance for those who want to do things like pre-stock for alts.

First off - I base none of this on actual hard data.

That said, my perception is that there is a supply side shortage. I think this may be because there are fewer people playing on live and therefore fewer people are getting and putting excess IOs on the market. As the live server player base drops, demand doesn't drop at the same rate as the supply drops. Basically, I don't think that supply and demand are a 1:1 relationship.

What about tying the the IO drop percentage to the overall game population averaged across all servers for some small period of time like 48hrs or 1 week? As average game population goes down, have the IO drop rates creep up.

Increasing drop rates might need a little finessing, though. If you just drastically increased them across the board, things that are already dropping too commonly for their demand would just be extra junk (hi, Ruin!), and Pool C/Ds would probably see less of an increase compared to how much demand there is for some of them.

Maybe...
Increase supply, but weight it based on actual demand somehow. Go beyond weighting by set type to weighting by actual set or something.

Give a bonus drop rate on teams. While farming is popular, a lot of 50s still spend their time on teams... and, well, splitting drops eight ways kinda sucks. Generating some extra drops for teams, similar to the XP bonus, could be helpful in getting more purples into circulation. If nothing else, it'd make teaming more viable for people who want cash Now.