The Flipper: Hero of the Markets

Got it, you don't understand the concept of change over time, or the idea that most people aren't going to leave up bids in perpetuity.

To the extent that I can buy up low priced supply I can shift the price point. The counter to this is the bargain shopper can try and look in and hope to catch where I am buying my low cost and bid a little higher. Unless they plan to make what I am doing their niche good luck at that because it doesn't pay if you want only one or 2. Even if they do they have taken a considerable penalty to get their shiny.

Some of what you're seeing is caused by the evolution of the game. The change in steadfast prices was caused by people discovering they could softcap on Super Reflexes, and how GOOD the softcap was, and taking [for instance] Tough to put a Steadfast in. That was a matter of build evolution. I picked up a Steadfast Res/Def when I did the original 6,000,000 inf man back in, like, July 2007. Because it was 60K including crafting costs and I couldn't afford the Steadfast -KB I wanted.

The change in Reactive Armor was caused [probably; I haven't been following it] by the "typed/ranged" changes. (For those following at home: Used to be you'd get ONE typed defense, and no "half spillover". Thunderstrikes gave you 2.5% Energy at the 3-slot and no Neg or Ranged; you got 2.5% ranged with 6 and no En/Neg.) Reactives become much more useful when you get some amount of Ranged, Melee, AOE, as well as En/Neg, Smash/Lethal, and Fire/Cold- especially when you can stack that with [e.g.] 3.75% Range/En/Neg from Thunderstrikes or 4.11% F/C/AOE from Aegis. So the softcap became far more accessible to far more builds. And Reactive Armor helps pretty much any kind of Defense you're working on, at least a little bit.

There may have been other changes that boosted Reactive Armor, for instance the introduction of BoTZ (getting people used to softcapped Defense) and its nerfing (causing people to go elsewhere for the Defense they lost.)

Some of it may have been "general inflation": respecs are going for 180M last weekend instead of... what did they used to be? Like 45M at one point?

I'm certain some of it is also "inflation of expectations"- if you expect to spend a couple million per slot no matter what, you pay more (and more casually) than if you expected to spend half a million per slot on the normal stuff. When the invention system started, spending 300 million inf on a build was a number so big people couldn't fit it in their brain. Now people spend 300 million inf on one slot.

No, I understand them just fine.

Change over time is why this argument that flippers can magically raise prices is stupid; you might be able to raise them briefly, but it won't stick.

You can raise the low end. At least temporarily. But...

Unless you sell the items, you're just losing money doing that. And if you sell them, you will also be driving the top end of the price down.

This is stupid. All they have to do is watch for lowish numbers, bid 1 inf above the last low number, and wait a little bit. I usually give it half an hour on anything but oranges.

Seriously, it's that easy. They don't have to try to guess what your bid is -- if you're getting anything, they'll see it scroll past, and if your bid isn't showing up, you're not affecting the prices, because your bids aren't doing anything.

... the last time I tried to buy up the low priced supply was when Going Rogue went live. I spent about 3 billion on crafted IO's. I managed to sell them for a little over 2 billion, minus the 10% Wentfee. So I got half my money back. Go me.

Last week Celerity:Stealths were 50 million crafted. This week they're like 20 million. I have a few that are listed at 40,100,908 that aren't selling. Why? Someone listed lower than me, and people started paying that price. (I may be wrong about the specific combo of prices and IO and time. I got burnt a couple times lately- L40 Miracle Heal/Rech and L50 Celerity:Stealth are two where I had to mark down my prices- so I might be mixing up a couple events.)

Prices spike up when there's a big event (like Going Rogue, or a new issue, or double XP, or whatever) and then gradually come down. It's consistent. It's predictable. Like King Canute, we cannot command the tide. It's just too large.

I give. I was trying to figure out whether you were lying or clueless, but it turns out to have been a trick question. You're both. *plonk*

Missing the point that the market DID function with a hell of a lot less flipper/crafters so the low bids DID fill for a good 18 months or so. That's why people don't see those expectations as totally unrealistic.

How do you know there were ever fewer flippers/crafters? Lower population does not mean that subpopulation had to change at all.

Also WHICH market do you refer to with those 18 months? We used to have 2 now we have 1. I would also point out the current environment is heavily tilted towards 1-20 with Praetoria in high demand and at other times people were in MA getting PLed madly to the top.

I seem to recall common arcane salvage prices were much higher then. Luck Charms seem to be much lower now than they were in the blue market for years.

Do you see that people claim flippers at work only in the areas they are looking at? Is it even believable that it is all flippers versus supply and demand with the flippers swimming where the fish are?

What you're describing has started to happen more since the market merge, but I have sold thousands of crafted IOs to say that it's still profitable, and after a week the price often goes back where it was before.

I'm not whining about it, I've made an 11 digit sum in various ways off the market. I just regret the passing of the premium on patience. Nobody's saying you should be able to buy recipes at less than vendor prices (about 3K in the case of the recipes I was talking about), but you used to be able to get almost all the non uber desirable uncommon recipes at 30-35 assuming the sets went higher than that for 20K if you waited. Allow for inflation in the general market, if I could still get my reactive armors for 100K I wouldn't be complaining.

A little bit of umbrage, and something that has gotten me in trouble before on this forum:

Crafting is not art. It is simple and takes virtually no time. Why people pay more for the end result v. the components is still a mystery to me. A profitable mystery.

Other than that, lay on MacDuff!

Where do you come by this magical bit of data?

Flipping was my second market discovery, hot on the heels of figuring you could make a fortune (by the pre-market definition, anyway) vendoring recipes.

Point being, there have been flippers for as long as there's been a market.
The behavior of supply and demand is a better explanation for why good stuff costs more now than flipping.

Anyway, flippers do NOTHING to the high end of the price range. They have to price behind the curve to move stock and keep slots clear. I know its hard for many of you to hear, but PLAYERS decide what stuff is "worth", not flippers.

You can't flip junk nobody wants, and you can't make anyone pay more than they want to bid.

I've published some research in an area I wouldn't expect to be popular a while ago, harmonised healing 32-27 or something of that sort. I forget the precise details, but this is the sense of it. I found that there were no recipes for sale and a plentiful supply of crafted IOs at 2-3M each, and a very large proportion of the last week's recipe sales across those levels were at exactly the same strange price, 186774 or some such. That to me is evidence of a flipper/crafter in an odd place.

Salvage has always been flipped, but I think more people are in on the recipe game now.

I was referring to both markets, I operated in both and while there were some differences between them, the patterns were broadly similar.

I think the market has become more cut-throat with the merger, with the same number of people chasing half as many niches. Some would have been chasing them both sides, but others would have mainly oprated on one, so the competition will hav increased.

I do not mean to offend but I find it difficult to believe your research was unbiased towards a finding plus there is no way without developer access to information you can know what is actually going on in a blind market.

The anti-flippers group sound like a witch hunt to me. Anything you guys don't like going on in the market is blamed on the flippers' black magiks.

... which results in higher buy prices and lower sell prices. Nonflippers win.

Three cheers for the flippers!

Hip hip... hooray!
Hip hip... hooray!
Hip hip... hooray!

Why does anyone buy instant mashed potatoes, when the real thing is cheaper and tastier and perfectly easy to make? Because people are willing to pay for the convenience.

That said, I've never anyone in a supermarket cursing the maufacturers because of the mark-up on Smash over wholesale raw potatoes. Maybe some people would find the CoX market less distressing if recipes and salvage sold in a different building to crafted IOs.

Again, flipping isn't crafting. But... Seriously, lots of people bid exactly whatever the last sale was at. For that matter, maybe some guy did bid that price on ten of the recipes, and got a bunch of 'em. So.... So what, exactly? You could have had that recipe at any time by bidding 186,775. If you didn't, it's because you didn't want to pay as much for the recipe as that guy did, so why should the sellers be penalized just because you object to people crafting?

On the other side of things: Crafting is sorta tedious. It can take a bunch of running back and forth figuring out what all the salvage you need is, and how many of them you need, and then realizing that you need an orange that's 3 million inf, and so on... And if you make 50M just doing the normal stuff you do while running around hanging out with your friends, why not just buy the crafted enhancement and save the time?

... Which is to say, it's exactly like why I buy a lot of premade stuff that I could cook myself. I know how to make homemade pizza. I can make dough, I can make sauce. I can make really nice pizza that I love to eat. On the other hand, it takes time. And I'd usually rather just toss a frozen pizza in the oven and get back to what I was doing.

Stop being a language nazi, many people use flipping for both flipping and crafting as they have a VERY similar effect. Player A's recipe ends up as player B's slotted enhancement after player C has made a profit in the middle.

Somebody bid that strange number on at least 4 of the last 5 purchases across each of 6 levels (and maybe more, I only checked those 6). The effect on me is that I have to pay 200K if I want one, not a disaster, but 180K more than I would have had to pay without the crafter.

Read my posts, I don't hate crafters, it's how I make my billions these days, and I've made billions flipping salvage in the past although haven't done that for a while. I just dislike having to do it to be able to afford stuff that I used to be able to fund with normal play. I'm not somebody who wants lots of purples on every toon, I have one purpled out permadom, but most of my builds are not cheap but not silly, and I can't get close to funding them just through normal play while I used to be able to do so.

Not all of that is anything to do with flippers, some of it is the cottoning on that certain sets are actually rather good (kinetic combat) combined with the introduction of new and desirable powersets that use particular sets (VEATs with red fortunes). That was why I did my research on the set I did, but serendipity also followed the same pattern.

Just to point out something here. I don't know about anyone else, but I get the rare and uncommon salvage I need to craft IOs intended for sale on the market from the AE ticket vendor. It's a lot faster and easier that way and it doesn't take very long to replenish those tickets. It's especially easier compared to trying to buy that salvage from the market!

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Smurphy: A significant amount of the "factual, observable, provable principles" in this thread are wrong. Flippers compete against, and thus "hurt", patient and intelligent buyers and sellers. The overall good/bad can be debated but at least one person would be better off if flippers did not exist.

The "listed for less than anyone else was willing to list it for" line needs an asterisk next to it. Technically true at the moment in time the flipper gets the sale. My understanding of flipping is that one attempts to purchase an item for a price that is lower than one sells it for. Perhaps the original poster has developed some new flipping strategy where he sells at a price that is less than he buys at. Someone else listed the item for less than the flipper did at a recent moment in time.

So if a flipper lists an item 100 they likely buy at 50 or 70 or 80. Someone else listed for 50 or 70 or 80 at some point in time. So "listed for less than anyone else was willing to list it for" is only true in that one moment the flipper gets the sale.

Ahh, yes. Language nazis. Like people who distinguish between "stealing" and "earning", those cursed language nazis are always pointing out when two things are totally different.

That's nice. Many people believe that "property" is "theft", too.

The problem here is, you're equivocating -- you're making a bad argument. Because you start by asserting that "flipping" means two different things, then you apply your theory about the effects of one of them to the other.

Only they don't.

And this is different from Player A's recipe ending up as Player B's slotted enhancement after Player A has made a profit how, exactly? Or different from Player C's recipe ending up as Player B's slotted enhancement?

Oh, that's right. It's no different at all. It doesn't make any difference who does the crafting. Crafting is a different way of making money that relies on creating value -- changing what's available. You ever buy furniture for more than the materials cost? If so, do you think the people selling it to you are "flippers"? How about restaurants? Do you pay exactly the cost of raw ingredients when you go out to eat? If not, does that make the restaurants "flippers"?

Only that's not necessarily the case at all. It might be that without the crafter providing a steady supply of bids, people would just be vendoring the recipes. It might be that without the crafter providing enhancements, the people who were buying enhancements would be buying the recipes -- and since they're impatient they might have bid 500k instead of 180k on the recipe. Or whatever.

You're just making stuff up! There's no particular reason for which your speculations about what else could have happened are any better than any other speculations. You're not showing any evidence that your speculations are more accurate or more likely. You're just inventing a scenario in which you'd have been better off, and asserting that that scenario is the ONLY possible outcome had someone not been crafting -- even though we all know of many other possible scenarios.

So complain about ncsoft/Paragon not building enough inf sinks into the game.

In fact, none of it seems to have anything to do with flippers. All it has to do with is the basic game design creating arbitrary inflation over time.

That's completely unfair. I don't think of you as an idiot because you disagree with the gurus. Now, considering that you've said multiple things that are idiotic and believe in them wholeheartedly, that might colour people's opinions.

I guess what I'm saying is that negative opinions can be formed wholly out of factual events, rather than reactionary tribalism.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I can't let that go. "Flipping" or "trading" as I prefer it is buying something with the intent of selling later for a profit. "Crafting" is buying all the components of an item, crafting it, and selling it for more than it cost you. The former is a service that makes inf for the service provider. The latter makes no sense to me, but I'm no afraid to turn 4mm in materials into 30mm in influence, which then gets burned.

If you think that is the same thing, you might want to come to one of my weekly seminars,

No one disputes that prices in CoH are, overall, going up.

What's disputed is the assumption that the mythical "flippers" are somehow the cause, and the massive influx of inf generated by people playing the game is totally irrelevant, as are floods of new level 50 characters after a new expansion resulted in a few new sets being available.

We have two very compelling explanations in hand which are in and of themselves completely sufficient to explain the observed behavior of prices, but instead you're telling us that the "flippers" cause that behavior.

Well.

If that's the case, then riddle me this:

* We know that the flood of inf would normally be expected to raise prices over time anyway.
* Every time there's new sets or a new expansion or something, demand goes up (and since a lot of people are busy playing, there's a ton of new inf coming into the game).

... And yet, you're telling me that the price difference between "a while back" and "now" is entirely due to flippers. And yet, I just identified two maor factors which should be increasing prices.

So, if you're right... And the ENTIRE price gap is caused by "flippers", such that you would still be paying those prices from years ago if there were no flippers...

What are the major downward pressures on prices which completely trump the obvious economic impact of the factors I've pointed out? Because there have to be some, or you're just plain wrong. So where is it? Where is the huge outflow of inf from the economy which completely eradicates the effects of thousands of players generating millions of inf every night? Where is the massive decrease in demand for high level recipes and IOs, to balance the normal increase we get when a lot of people roll new characters and level them to 50 around the same time?

And a gallon of gas used to be $1. Now its $3. Relevant? Not really. I still have to pay $3 for my gallon of gas. The fact that I used to pay $1 is meaningless.

As I see it, its semantics in a way that eludes to flippers somehow getting a better deal than everyone else.

It is factual that a flipper must be the highest bidder in order to purchase said item.

It is factual that a flipper must be the lowest seller in order to sell his item.

Debating what he paid for it vs what he sold it for and putting semantics on it leave people feeling that they're being screwed. The fact is, they're not. There is no special club for flippers that gives them access to items not available to the general public. They are under the same constraints as everyone else.

The only, and I mean the only, advantage the flipper has is patience. You can out bid a flipper by 1 inf and undersell him by that same 1 inf and you have "shut him down".

Showing that the flipper is screwing someone because he bought it for what someone was willing to sell it for, then turned around and sold it for what someone was willing to buy it for is just silly.