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which is no different from the game as a whole.|
Originally Posted by DevilYouKnow
I'm not saying it's impossible to learn it. It isn't. But you can't learn it from the tutorials. You either trial and error you way through until you figure it out or come to the forums and read the guides. (The guides are much quicker)
If the market is so simple, why in the world do you guys write all these guides? |
anyone can walk into a warehouse with any old character and bash a bunch of enemies on the head, so why all the AT guides?
Both the market and the core game are relatively straighforward- pretty much everyone can figure out enough 'on the fly' to do well.
Increased efficiency and the rewards it brings are open to all but require more attention and energy.
Just as not everyone has an IO'ed out farming brute (because that takes time, effort and intent), not everyone is going to make billions 'playing' the market.
But anyone who plays CAN have that brute and CAN earn billions marketeering if they make the effort.
No, the game doesn't hand you either of those rewards on a silver platter.
Which is by design.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I can see your point that the game system rewards a more in depth knowledge, I agree. The difference in my view is that the market is not a pure interaction between individuals and an automated program. It is a mild sort of PvP.
Unlike PvP zones there is no warning that other players are going to attack your wealth when you enter the auction house. The tutorial doesn't mention the adversarial nature of the market. It doesn't mention that people are going to undercut your offers and snipe your bids or that players are going to over pay to set a higher price or try to corner the market or any number of other things that occur.
Certainly if a new player wondered into a PvP zone and was killed dozens of times because he doesn't know the slightest thing about PvP he is unlikely to want to keep trying to PvP.
The tutorial basically tells you about the listing fees and the most basic functions. The market is daunting for new players and many of them opt out and that's a shame.
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So when I list something for 5 million and it sells for 20 I'm being ganked by the buyer?|
Originally Posted by DevilYouKnow
I can see your point that the game system rewards a more in depth knowledge, I agree. The difference in my view is that the market is not a pure interaction between individuals and an automated program. It is a mild sort of PvP.
|
Huh, interesting.
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| Unlike PvP zones there is no warning that other players are going to attack your wealth when you enter the auction house. |
Your PvP analogy is pure fail.
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| It doesn't mention that people are going to undercut your offers and snipe your bids or that players are going to over pay to set a higher price or try to corner the market or any number of other things that occur. |
Because there are no timers in the AH.
Quote:
| Certainly if a new player wondered into a PvP zone and was killed dozens of times because he doesn't know the slightest thing about PvP he is unlikely to want to keep trying to PvP. |
You have some really strange notions of how things work. I'm beginning to suspect you don't have a very strong understanding of markets in general.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
It's interesting to me that I have heard marketers defend and descibe the market as a kind of pvp minigame and that is what the developers want.
Obviously, you don't agree.
I call it bid sniping when I can see that another flipper is bidding 1001 for an item and I slide in and bid 1010. I am keeping his bid from filling (for a little while anyway).
I also recall discussions where marketers talk about attacking a niche that another player is working.
That seems pvp like to me. If not to you, then cool.
Actually playing it is definitely not in any way like PvP. I can tell you this with confidence because my brain is seriously defective and interprets any PvP content of any sort whatsoever as panic-inducing horror. But I like playing with WW/BM.
Because, ultimately, it really is cooperative. I have a bunch of steady bids up. Sometimes people outbid me. They are not "sniping" me or "attacking" me. They're willing to pay more than I am, so they do. Fine by me.
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The competitors in the market are the people on the same team.|
Originally Posted by DevilYouKnow
It's interesting to me that I have heard marketers defend and descibe the market as a kind of pvp minigame and that is what the developers want.
|
Sellers are competing with other sellers to offer goods at the lowest price so they can get the sale, buyers are competing with other buyers to get what they want by making the highest current bid without spending more than they'd like.
Every market sale is the result of a cooperative effort between the buyer and seller to arrive at a mutually acceptable price. There is no loser in any transaction. The seller got what they felt was a fair price, the buyer paid what they wanted to pay.*
That's the dirty little secret of the market.
If you must draw an in-game parallel, it's more Rikti War Zone than Recluse's Victory.
Quote:
| I call it bid sniping when I can see that another flipper is bidding 1001 for an item and I slide in and bid 1010. I am keeping his bid from filling (for a little while anyway). |
That's just paying more because you want it more...and if you think that's some kind of unfair market voodoo I can't help you.
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| I also recall discussions where marketers talk about attacking a niche that another player is working. |
The result of 'attacking' a niche is a narrowing of profit margins, meaning that sellers of raw materials make more and buyers pay less.
I thought you were worried about "the little guy"?
All those sharks are competing with each other to deliver more value to 'the little guy' than their competitors, because they want that sale.
* barring typos or other mishaps
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Yeah. I really do believe that people who don't enjoy PvP look at the references to "market PvP" and project that image of one player defeating another onto a dislike of high market prices. They imagine that the high price is set by that guy that's trying to "defeat" them.
But that's not what most of the "market PvP" is about at all. It's about sellers competing to either undercut other sellers or at least beat them to the sale, and about bidders competing to outbid other bidders or at least beat them to the buy. It's not buyer vs. seller or vice versa.
Now, if you've got a situation like someone trying to create a price bubble for profit, that's sort of PvP-ish, but that's more like them (and anyone they're colluding with) against everyone else. Player vs. Population, or something.
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
OK. That makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up.
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It's like PvP in other ways. It's a playfield that includes emergent playstyles that can't always be predicted with a great deal of accuracy. Everything works different there, and not quite the way you'd expect it to. |
Originally Posted by seebs
Actually playing it is definitely not in any way like PvP. I can tell you this with confidence because my brain is seriously defective and interprets any PvP content of any sort whatsoever as panic-inducing horror. But I like playing with WW/BM.
|
Tell people that they'll get more on the market, and they might try (I know I did) selling SO drops on the market the same way they sell recipes, salvage, and inspirations. Does not work. Nobody buys them. Back when the market started, and before you could mail yourself inf, I had a level 47 Interrupt Duration TO that I'd use as a token. It was in the inventory of an old character that hadn't been played for an even longer time -- back when level 25+ TO drops were routine. It was like base salvage, a slice of game history.
I could use this enhancement for inf transfers because it became obvious that there is no market for SO drops on the market. It isn't immediately obvious why this is so. Most players still use some SOs, at least to patch in the holes until they can collect useful sets to be slotted. You'd expect to find them priced higher than vendor sell but lower than vendor buy prices. This kind of economic thinking doesn't take transaction costs into account: to buy SOs on the market, you'd have to go there, look them up, and confirm that you were paying less than you would from a vendor. The same way with selling them. Because players can't be feagued to do this, rather than just vendoring them, no trade in SOs ever really develops.
<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison
I'd agree that both PvP and the market are prone to strange emergent patterns, but I don't think that makes the market like PvP, any more than the market is like AE.
I remember the same thing with a buggy 51 confuse TO I somehow wound up with. Slipped up and it got deleted. Ah, memories...
I still have a 53 Training TO. 
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 have been playing 18 months and for the first year or so I tried to use the market, wondering why I could never get my stuff to sell or if it did why I didn't seem to make much money when I did.
There is a layer of complexity involved in reading the last 5 sales, trying to determine the flippers from the buyitNAOs, calculating the price based not on just the last five but number of bidders, items for sale, and how fast items sell and lastly having some idea of what an item should be worth regardless of what the last 5 sold for. Add into that market craziness caused by in game events and players doing counter profit activities and you have quite a few factors that the Went's NPCs don't brief you on.
I'm not saying it's impossible to learn it. It isn't. But you can't learn it from the tutorials. You either trial and error you way through until you figure it out or come to the forums and read the guides. (The guides are much quicker)
If the market is so simple, why in the world do you guys write all these guides?
There's more to it than that if you want to marketeer your way to billions, obviously. There's more to it than that if you want to make the best possible coin for your drops, even -- but nothing about the market even comes close to the complexity and counter-intuitiveness of the Invention system or even Enhancement Diversification.
Heck, all the different names for SOs can be confusing to a new player. Even the real numbers the devs finally gave us in the game interface can be outright misleading, even if you're seasoned enough to know what all of them mean (or should mean). An understanding of the game's mechanics will obviously increase one's understanding of the items being sold, and thus increase one's ability to make money on the market -- but none of that is strictly necessary to sell stuff for comparatively large gains.
The point here, I think, is that people who know enough to get full use out of the rarest and most expensive items in the game shouldn't be complaining that the Market is too complicated to use. That's an inherently self-conflicted position; either they really don't know enough about CoH builds to get full use out of those items -- in which case the game is actually doing those players a favor by delaying their acquisition of said items -- or they're overestimating how intimidating the market really is.