What happened to the MARKET????

Hey folks. I have been off COH for about 18 months. I had played up to 4 1/2 years before that..
Anyway, I remember back in the old days I could get items and IOls for decent price.
Now though, it seems like everything is skyrocket high.

What caused this a lack of supply that = huge demand?

Where would I find info on how to work this new expensive market?

Please sombody, just anybody HELP

earning power has increased, so more money is chasing 'the good stuff'.

also there have been a couple of hyper-efficient MA farms going over the past couple weeks, which causes odd supply behavior since all the farmers get paid in tickets.

You wouldn't want to bother to check out the other threads whining about the market before starting your own would you?

Please define everything and skyrocket high.

Meanwhile introduced into the game were Reward merits to directly buy items. Mission Architect tickets to buy random recipes. And most recently alignment (hero or villain) merits to directly buy any recipe in the game.

A large number of things have crashed hard in the past few months due to those game additions.

Also they doubled the amount of influence a level 50 was earning because it was bugged previously.

Anyone who's been gone a while would totally get sticker shock today.

Welcome back. Unfortunately prices are now a lot higher than they used to be, this has been caused by a number of things:
1. Merits and Alignment-Merits significantly shifted the supply of certain items (primarily pool C/D recipes)
2. Level 50s had their inf drops pretty much doubled a few issues back
3. The AE further shifts things by providing a steady source of rare salvage and recipes but no Purples, this is made even worse whenever the farmers find a new exploit (we are just recovering from one such case).

The net result is a bit of overall inflation combined with a larger portion of the total economy being focused on buying the really high end recipes (purples and PvPIOs).

Don't forget that everybody who can take the heat can be a farmer, even kind of unintentionally, using the I16 difficulty settings.

Short answer, a whole lot of people are a whole lot richer than they used to be. In some cases, some items are rarer than they use to be. More money + rarity = KA-POW!

Also, hero and villain markets have been merged.

MUDflation isn't pretty. Perhaps the devs will address it after they fix the PVP system...

There are two roads to riches, just as there always were:
1) Play game, sell stuff
2) Play with market, buy and sell stuff.

#2 is really the same as it's ever been, only the specific numbers are different. If Alchemical Silver has a low of 80K and a high of 200K, instead of a low of 40K and a high of 100K, you do the same things to flip it but you type in different numbers. There are a LOT of things that you can buy for a million or two, craft, and sell for 8-10 million.

#1 is actually where you can do what you used to do, more or less, and make more money. If rare salvage used to be a milliion inf, and now it's two million, that benefits the person who beats critters. You can get lots of stuff with Alignment Merits [you can either get them with 50 old-school merits and 20 million inf, or you can get them by doing tip missions- which I really enjoyed, until I overdid them.] You don't have to farm in the traditional sense- there are a lot of ways to get regular merits at a reasonable rate. Were story arcs giving out regular merits 18 months ago? They do now.

One quick-and-dirty way to make money: If you have characters with a few Reward Merits, they can get enough for a random roll or enough for an Alignment Merit by getting all the location badges in each major zone- each zone has an accolade, each accolade is 5 merits, it adds up.

Heck, if you have a character under level 40, I'll pay you 100 million inf, in advance, for the results of an Alignment Merit roll. Let me know when you play, what server, we'll meet up. I give you the money, you take the 5 random recipe option and give me the recipes, everyone happy.

Thanks guy you guys are great on this site . I have no idea why I never interactedwith these boards before now. Man I missed out on a lot.. Anyway, I guess Ill do this the hard way and just get SO's up to 50 then start getting money for the market . Goodness this supply and demand thing is like real life economics now.. Better get cracking on my controller and get it ready .

Why not slot common IOs at 25-35 levels.

Save replacing the IOs and save a decent chunk of amount of inf over the remaining levels ?