On the nature of ebil and marketeering

"You may get the thing you want for 100k inf in a few days, or maybe you'll get it for 5000 inf in a week, or maybe you'll wait and wait and not get it at all for any price."

"You'll certainly get the thing you want for 90k right now. If you're willing to wait, you'll most likely get it for 25k in a day or two."

You're saying you'd prefer the first situation because the "average" price is lower? And it's not entirely clear how the second situation is better?

No they don't.

They cannot make people pay more than people want to pay.

Perhaps you need to stop with theory and look at how the market works.

Lowest lister is sold to highest bidder.

This means at some time a flipper had to be the highest bidder and then later they have to be the lowest lister or they will buy nothing and sell nothing.

Flippers find items where the gap between the lowest and highest price make a profit margin for them. They did not create either of those extremes.

All they do is take items from impatient sellers and sell them to impatient buyers.

That's not the question I asked you. I asked you to quote where someone said that flippers lowered prices. You made the claim that people said that, and that you were rebutting that claim. I'm asking you to point out what you were rebutting, because I don't see where it was said.

I'm open to the idea that I didn't look hard enough, but only if you can actually point it out to me. I'd hope, since you're rebutting it, that you know offhand generally where it was claimed.

That looks like a case of affirming the consequent. What you just said does not support the claim made.

Again, no they don't. They make a profit from buying it from someone listing it low and selling it to someone bidding high.

They prevent vast market shortfalls which used to happen all the times and still happen from time to time which drive up the prices even higher for periods of time AND make people wait to get them for those higher prices.

Yep and that gap is an increase in the price of the IO. I agree on the impatient buyer and sellers part.

If you buy an IO at 30 mil and list it at 50 mil can people at least agree that for that IO it's price was increased?

Well he is a very smart kid so I am not surprised that he could figure out the market. What does surprise me is these supposedly grown up people cannot figure it out.

I also don't understand how these supposed grownups who pay grownup bills can even seriously compare IOs in the market with rent, food and life's basic necessities.

Perhaps my mistake is in thinking they are grownups?

Nope. Not unless someone buys it.

And who forces someone to buy the flipper's 50 Million IO rather than someone else's 30 million IO? This isn't art work. Each level 30 LotG 7.5% IO is equal to every other level 30 LotG 7.5% IO so it doesn't matter if one sells for 30 M and then 50 M if I can buy one for myself at 30 M.

And do you realize your claim would mean flippers could make any item in the market go up to 2 billion in price because you never consider any other factors?

The gap is going to be there with or without the flippers in action because it was already there before the flipper saw the opportunity and went to work.

That one? Sure, assuming it sells at 50M.

What about the ones people were already selling for 55 or 60M? A flipper wouldn't pick a sale price of 50M out of thin air.

Reselling something at a higher price is not the same thing as "raising the price" unless you're the only sales actor on the market.

"Went to work" eh? Is that a new euphemism?

No one forces them to to buy the 50 mil true but if it wasn't for the flipper there wouldn't be the 50 mil to buy.

And there's no guarantee there would be anything there to buy, period, because someone may have bought it before you.

You seem to be mixing statistical and instantaneous views of the process. For example, bouncing between discussion of price floors, ceilings and averages/medians to discussions of what happens with single sales.

No it's a fairly common expression in English. Perhaps you are reading something into it that isn't there?

"Bob went to work on the puzzle on his card table."

"Karl went to work on cleaning the kitchen."

Sorry about the delay my net has been acting up.

Of course there are no guarantees but flipper is quite focused on taking away that 30 mil price IO aren't they?

Well you would be bouncing around too if you were talking to 3-4 people at once as well.

As for your earlier question, nobody did say Flipping lowers prices. Although there were maybe claims of increasing supply (through multiple means), lowering ceilings, freeing up slots and "keeping the market moving. I would assume most (if not all) of these claimed abilities would lead to some sort inf benefit to the buyer. But yes I took it a step further.

Just who are you aiming this post at? Your fallacy points don't seem to apply to anyone in this thread. Save the spiel I'm not buying.

So you've made up your mind and you won't let the facts get in your way? Check.

Thanks for letting me know you have no serious intention of trying to get information.

Those are long running fallacies people have been spouting for 3 1/2 years since the markets and inventions were added to the game.

Until you and people like you get that IOs are luxury items in the game and that prior to the markets people couldn't afford even SOs until their 30s without sugar daddies you will continue to bang your head into the wall of reality.

I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish here but education is clearly not one of your goals.

Market stability encourages participation. Participation raises supply and demand. In CoH's case specifically, flippers make sellers' lives easier by freeing up inventory slots, which incentivizes sellers to participate, which raises supply.

LOL. It's easy to run half a dozen toons at the AH? And you're the one claiming to advocate for the non-hardcore marketeer?

As noted earlier, ad nauseam, I have 57 salvage slots, 26 recipe slots, 10 enhancements slots and 18 market slots on my Tanker. Running about three missions maxes out my inventory space. In Max_Zero's world, though, apparently 57 + 26 + 10 isn't greater than 18. Arithmetic isn't your strong suit, is it?

If I want to get back into the action, I have to move that inventory. I don't spend the next hour emailing things back and forth and writing down which character has what. The idea that you're somehow describing typical or desirable behavior is asinine.

Why do you suppose people running AE farms take rare salvage with their tickets when white salvage would earn them a better return per ticket (thus driving white salvage prices through the roof)? Because it isn't worth their time to spend hours trying to sell inventory for every full load of tickets.

You claim to be an authority on economics, and yet you don't understand the benefit of stability.

You know how more flippers drives prices down? Because the market sees more and more items being moved at lower-than-high-end price, which means that sellers at the high end of the spectrum (like you, with your LOL-seventy-million Regenerative Tissues) are encouraged to relist at a lower price. Thus, a stable average is reached. The more flippers there are, the faster you reach that point, until all the flippers leave because their profit margin is too small, and then the cycle begins anew.

You havent established that stability doesn't increase participation. Your problem is that it does. Posting graphs that rely on a flawed premise only earns you ridicule.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

You trotted out a bunch of one liners, none of which I agree with. I don't expect everything to be free I don't think everything should be easy to get.

Find anyone in this thread who has said that rare IOs should be free.

That's why I said your post didn't apply to anyone in this thread.

More self-conflicted gibberish. You keep saying, Max, that flppers don't add anything. They don't create items; they don't add to the money supply. What they do, and you've said it yourself about a hundred million times, is to add an extra transaction to the equation.

An extra transaction creates an extra set of market fees, thus lowering the money supply. Again, self-evident. Again, ignored by a guy who's read too many Wikipedia articles on economics out of context and doesn't understand the game environment we're discussing.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

No worries. I don't expect real-time communications on the forums.

They are, but again that doesn't imply that they're raising the overall price trend. The 30M inf purchase doesn't exist in a vacuum. There have to be other, higher prices in play or the flipper wouldn't even be in the picture. What the flipper did was potentially buy that IO from a bargain hunter. Those people have to pay a higher market price or wait longer. If the bargain hunter was bidding 29M, they now have to pay 3% more. If the bargain hunter was bidding 20M, they may have been in for a long wait anyway, whether or not a flipper came along.

Understood, but it does matter from a larger argument perspective. What happens to individual sales is not compelling when discussing what market activity does to price trends. The overall trend of all sales have to be considered, and that includes other actors than the bargain hunter and the flipper. As I've mentioned, a flipper will set their sale price based on other existing sale prices - in our example of buying at 30M and selling at 50M, a flipper wouldn't pick a price of 50M unless people were already making sales at 55M or so. (Honestly, an experienced flipper would never choose a round number like that. They would look for sales at 55M and list for 53.51 or something. But the point stands that a flipper is going to set a sale price beneath existing sales history or longer trend maxima.)

The primary claim I've see and that I accept as reasonable is that it flipping promotes market throughput at more stable prices. In my opinion, the market's greatest practical utility is as a pseudo-storage device. What I mean by that is if I get some rare drop X that I don't need right now, I want to be able to sell it on the market right now to get money for something I do want and have some confidence that, if I want to buy X again later, I will find one for sale in a reasonable period of time. Having consistent sales activity helps guarantee that. It doesn't give me any guarantees about the price I'll find, but at least it suggests there will be activity and also suggests a locally consistent price trend.

Your first paragraph makes no sense. You free up no slots because if they were selling the IOs so cheap someone else would of bought it. Then you raise the prices with lowers demand since you don't increase supply. You say you increase participation? By raising prices and keeping supply the same? Interesting.

Your second is a strawman. Never claimed to be anyone's advocate. Your 3rd paragraph I'm not even sure what it refers to.

I found one Uberguy.

But as for your poor reasoning Obitus. If you think the relisted prices would encourage a downward pressure on prices imagine what how much downward pressure those same IOs would provide before they were marked up by the flipper?

Yet now the IO costs more. Higher price + same supply = lower demand. Making it harder to get capital (IOs) does not help the game.

You raise participation by creating an environment where people can sell things quickly. Again, inventory is valuable. Your insistence that it isn't because people should spend endless time emailing items back and forth among a half-dozen alts is hilarious.

And again, you reveal your ignorance of the Market's mechanics. The seller would have received no sale or a lower price if the flipper weren't there. Why? Because the highest bid is paired with the lowest asking price. Thus, if the Flipper bought the item, then by definition he had the highest outstanding bid at the time.

No, in order to be a strawman, my argument would have to rely on the claim that you are anyone's advocate. It doesn't. What it does rely on is simple and irrefutable arithmetic. You claimed earlier that the only people who feel an inventory crunch were flippers -- the implication being that people who play the game normally have endless space.

Which is false on its face. Period.

You're saying that driving down the profit margin isn't creating a downward pressure on prices? They are equivalent forces. Remember, we're talking about multiple flippers competing with each other here.

You just don't see it because you think sharing market slots among an army of alts is a reasonable or common occurrence. So perhaps you don't care that you have 14 Regenerative Tissues that won't move now because you listed them at the max possible price and the market has since moved lower. I guess you can afford to wait if you have a legion of alts running on the market. Eventually, inflation might take care of you.

Everyone else? Not so much. That goes for people playing normally; that goes for marketeers who are trying to maximize their profit over time. You have to list things at a low enough price that they'll sell in a realistic span of time.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

It's true that the flipper needs higher prices to work under. Still does not change what the flipper does. I think the debate is whether the "freeing up of slots, market flow, stability, extra fees, etc" make up for the markup on the IO. For me I feel a lot of those benefits are overblown.

For the second paragraph. If one person could be nominated as the 'spokesman' it would make my life a lot easier. My point is that whatever that point below trend it will always be higher then point at which the flipper bought the IO. As I said before it's a trade off between the claimed benefits and the increase in price.

As for your third. I have said before it does provide stability but at what cost? I don't think the stability (and other claimed benefits) outweigh the costs.

Hmm. I'm not sure I believe that. Multiple flippers drive faster high/low price convergence on the equilibrium, but I'm not sure it provides particularly strong force to lower the equilibrium value.

They provide some overall downward pressure by increasing the number of market fees in the transaction chain, but I suspect that's a very weak, long-term effect even if prices are sufficiently out of equilibrium with the money supply for fees to drive price change.

Just for the record there are only a few Regens left. Most of them were sold previously. But yes I can wait.

No I claimed flippers tend to have slot space issues because they tend to be far more active AH wise. Putting all those speculative bids takes slots. Think you read a little too much into it.

I'm not saying that there isn't downward pressure on prices because of flippers. I'm just saying there would be even more if there were not any flippers. Without flippers adding their markup the IO would cost even less.