The Flipper: Hero of the Markets

Flipping in the context of this forum has a very specific, well defined & universally accepted meaning.

Flipping and crafting are not even roughly comparable and the have a VASTLY DIFFERENT 'effect'- flipping recirculates raw material through the market, crafting destroys raw materials in the creation of IOs.

Not even close to the same thing.

Oh, look at my shiny new sig!

But you are wrong and I ....

SHINY!

bbl

I see no shiny.

That's because the Goat bought it and deleted it.

Deleting stuff is MY shtick!

It is also factual that the person the flipper bought the item from listed the item for less than the flipper listed the item for. Which brings us to my point that: Saying "flippers are willing to sell for the least" is only true for one specific moment in time. *Unless the flipper is using a flipping strategy where the flippers bid higher than the flipper lists. Simply write down what a flipper is bidding, what a flipper is listing at, and an example of a price that another party may list at that would fill the flipper's bid to demonstrate I do not properly grasp this concept.

I made no comments to the contrary.

I made no comments to the contrary.

I did not mention anyone being "scewed". I used the word "hurt". Perhaps I should have used "negatively affected" instead.

If an item regularly fluctuates between a price of 50 and 100 a patient and intelligent buyer may buy at 50. A flipper, or 5, might come along and compete with one another and change the price range to 70 to 80. Thus, the person who was buying at 50 is negatively affected. Had the flipper not existed the patient and intelligent buyer would be better off.

Take careful notice that I did not use the words "screwed over".
Please read more carefully next time.

Well, sure. But at any given time, they are selling for less than anyone else is -- meaning if they weren't selling that item, no one would be selling it for that low a price right then. So it would actually cost MORE if they weren't there.

Now, let's take the famous example of the flipper buying something that someone else wanted for crafting.

Scenario A:

Lister lists some alchemical silver, specifying an asking price of 10k.
Flipper buys alchemical silver for 11k, lists it for 50k.
Buyer buys it for 50k.

So, clearly, if Flipper hadn't been there, Buyer would have gotten it for ten, right? WRONG. Here's what really happens:

Lister lists some alchemical silver, specifying an asking price of 10k.
Some Other Guy buys alchemical silver for 10k, uses it to make an accuracy IO he was gonna make.
Buyer shows up, bid creeps, and after a few minutes gets one for 80k, because that was the lowest price left on the market.

Buyer is better off; he paid less than he would have otherwise. But Some Other Guy is arguably worse off -- he couldn't get alchemical silver for 10k. But there's a whole LOT of Some Other Guys and Buyers and Listers, and the net result is, any attempt to analyze specific peoples' experiences is doomed -- you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison because there's so many thousands of possible scenarios. For all we know, Some Other Guy just leaves his 10k bid up, and when he comes back next weekend, he got his silver anyway.

True. And similarly, the people who were listing at 100k are worse off, because they can no longer charge that much.

In general, though, most people find that over time, they are better off when prices are more stable. Because that buyer who used to be getting something for 50, and is now paying 70, is also a seller who used to get 50, and is now getting 70.

All of the heal recipes have always been popular. (and incidentally, a great place to make inf) I know I've made influence buying L30 Triage recipes and salvage (the sum of which costs practically nothing; maybe 30,000 per) and selling them for 2mill each ever since IOs were introduced. I haven't done this in a while, since I've got more influence than I know what to do with, but just because you think flippers/crafters haven't been there, doesn't mean they haven't.

I never said you did actually say "screwed over". What I said was:

To quote you:

And your precise use of semantics is in fact allowing people to assume they are getting screwed. Their words, not yours or mine. However, I will put this in a more "real world" scenario to show you exactly what I mean. The time spans below are more "drawn out" than our market, but the principal is the same.

Car Dealer sells his cars for $15,000

I go and I buy my brand new car from him for $15,000.

That same dealer has a sale, lowering his price to $12,000.

My friend goes and buys his brand new car for $12,000.

By your assertions, I in fact over-paid for my car by $3,000 because at some point in time the price was $3,000 less than what I paid.

This is not true. I bought a car at what I perceived to be a good value. My friend did not find the value the same, so he did not buy. Later, he found the value to be good for him, so he bought a car for $3,000 less than I did.

My friend had patience. This gave him the opportunity to purchase for less than me.

If my friend decides a month later that he doesn't like the car and sells it for $14,500 to someone, did that someone in fact lose out on $2,500 because they could have bought it a month ago for $12,000?

I once again stand behind the facts as I stated originally:

When the flipper bought the item he was the highest bidder. No one else was willing to pay what he was.
When the flipper sold the item he was the lowest seller. No one else wanted to list for lower than he was.

As close as it seem some times, these 2 points in time are in fact separate places in time and cannot be applied to your "could have" or "should have" mentality.

If there were years between the transactions, would you make the same assertions?


EDIT:

After review, I find my views and Smurphy's to be similar. I still find his application of his opinion to be slightly inflammatory based on the witch-hunting that occurs on this forum when anyone mentions flipping.

I made two points in my original post:
1) The "listed for less than anyone else was willing to list it for" line needs an asterisk next to it.

Saying "at any given time" is clearly wrong. You listed a point in time where someone else listed the item for less than the flipper in your own example.

B) Flippers compete against, and thus "hurt", patient and intelligent buyers and sellers.

You concede that point when you said "True" and quoted my restatement of that point.

I never said anything to the contrary.

Call it nitpicking if you like. But saying "The flipper lists items for less than anyone else" isn't always true. Saying "Flippers help everyone" also isn't true.

Still Smurphy here: I assure you, I don't need an explanation of how flippers are a stabilizing force.

I am not going to debate what some third parties who read my posts may "assume" or "perceive".

I agree.

No, I would not.


That's a flipper. The flipper is buying at 225,555,556 and selling at something over 300M. There's at least 5 transactions that occurred today. Someone is listing the items for less than the flipper. Also, other players may be listing their Hecatombs for sale in the 230 to 300M range. Some of those sales may go to other players.

Stating "The flipper is the person listing the item for the least" or "The flipper is the person bidding the most" is only true for those moments in times where a flippers transaction goes through. Those two statements need an asterisk or a further explanation... like the one you eloquently wrote above.

What does it "need" an asterisk for? If it doesn't have that asterisk, who dies?

You miss the point. If someone else is listing the item for less, the flipper isn't selling items and is not affecting sale prices.

Except I don't concede it. I concede that there exist purely hypothetical scenarios in which you can point to someone who would have been better off without the flipper, but I don't concede that, in general, "patient and intelligent" buyers and sellers are "hurt". In any given transaction where you think a flipper "hurt" someone, I can point to someone else who got a better deal as a result of the change.

Really, though, what you're doing here is revealing the problem. When you say "patient and intelligent buyers and sellers", you really mean "cheap and greedy people who want to get better deals than other people get". Those are the people who are "hurt" by the flippers -- because those are the only people who benefit substantially from a highly volatile market.

The people who are getting stuff for half its usual price are getting it by paying someone else less than that person would have gotten in a more stable market. They're hurting someone. The people who are selling stuff for twice its usual price are getting it by charging someone else more than that person would have gotten in a more stable market. They're hurting someone.

The flippers "hurt" only the aggressors who are making the market suck in the first place -- the people who call it "patient and intelligent" when they take advantage of other peoples' ignorance to pay less and sell for more, but "abusive" when someone else pays more and sells for less.

No, but as a general rule, we discount sociopaths when talking about "everyone", because fair's fair; they discount us, we discount them.

The game community as a whole benefits dramatically from stabilized prices in the middle of the range, and in the long run, that tends to lead to a market where it's easier to buy something quickly without paying such a huge premium.

But apparently, the way in which a stabilizing force is good for other people is a bit too subtle?

You have proof of this? Please identify the method by which you determined which players participated in each of those transactions.

If they're listing for less than the flipper is listing for, they get sold before the flipper's do.

Yup!

Which is pretty much obvious, because if the flipper's transactions aren't going through, there's no flipping.

1. In most MMOs, crafting is not as accessible as it is in ours. You need to have certain skills, which normally you can only pick some of rather than all, and must train up to the level needed to craft the items. Therefore, the ability to craft the item comes at a premium. While that's not true in this game, some people expect it anyways, so prices go up.

2. If there's only one available, price can be pushed up. By buying all the recipes and crafting them all, it's possible to spike prices.

3. Many people don't compare crafted vs. uncrafted prices, so aren't aware of the discrepancies.

And many other reasons.

Oddly enough, in most of the MMO's the crafted items are usually worth less than the sum of their parts. Which is silly. Not to mention the general cost of leveling that trade skill to the point where you can make the "valuable" things causes crafting to be a money sink in the end.

This is the first game I have played where that is usually not true. Which is also silly.

I opened my market transaction window. *EDIT*I am a flipper.

The original poster said some statements that are true... except when they are false. I simply pointed out the second part.

Unless you're doing the flipping you have no way of knowing.

I often put up multiple bids for this or that IO without bothering to vary my price. I have poor friends and buy stuff for them all the time.

You can suspect flipping but it is basically unknowable without firsthand information. Which I'm sure is why it's such a popular scapegoat with the paranoid and uninformed.

Lets play spot the fallacy. I'll even give a personal anecdote. I know some people that were trying sell software based on a cloud computing model where the end user, would in effect be purchasing the program as a rental and have their data held hostage by the vendor. They went under in 2001.

From the above you might conclude any of the following
1. You can't sell software as a service
2. The dot bomb crash killed them
3. Users will not allow their business data to be held hostage by their vendors

My own interpretation was that they had chosen too difficult a market segment for that technique, and at the time were unable to offer sufficient benefit. The dot bomb collapse was incidental, in that it dried up the supply of people that were investing in things that should never have received one red cent of funding.

Now since the market merge, I started shifting about 20 items and I am currently at about 10.

I would show mine but I am off to bid 255,555,557 on a hecatomb

In the only other one I played much, while many items were worth less than the sum of their parts, you could easily make a fortune levelling most trade skills if you knew which ones were the other way around...

Alchemy?

Wrong game None of those professions were profitable unless you could acquire ultra-rare recipes for some reason and get the rare materials to make them - even then, it was only 1 or 2 of the professions and only for very short stints in your leveling - never enough to "make ends meet" so to speak. Anyone who says they made money leveling their crafting in that game is a liar - I know - I played it for 5 years and leveled every crafting profession

Hmm, I thought this was supposed to be a lighthearted thread. Anyway, reduction in the money supply should not be the ultimate goal. What you want to see is an increase in the real purchasing power of the individual. In your example, flippers cause an increase of 10 million in the average purchasing price despite draining inf from the economy at roughly twice the normal rate. Given the flippers' profit of 12 million, that might actually be a fairly accurate example; we'll never know the exact numbers though.

Every profession. I had them all maxed out on one toon or another, and I always made money at it. Just a matter of paying attention.

... This is not the first game in which I've been a marketer.

Making money at max level was not the issue - and for most of the professions you had to farm your own mats. Buying them did not work out to be proffitable unless your chosen server was different from most. Leveling all of the professions was not profitable. Mostly because 99% of what you had to / could make was garbage from the start - no one ever wanted it - even when it was "good".

Anyways - thread jacking is bad m'kay

BACK ON TOPIC PEOPLE!

Flippers are... bad? Good? Smelly? Where were we again?