On the nature of ebil and marketeering

Yes...the lowballers are still there. You as a consumer have access to them as well. Therefore, your buy price hasnt risen.

Thank you, Ill be here all day

Try the veal

--Frog

Seems we're making some small measure of progress here. Or Max is just willing to say whatever's expedient at the time.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Welcome to the market forums Max_Zero.

By now you may have noticed that discussing certain topics on these pages is like trying to take a banana away from a pack of crazed howler monkeys or shaking a cage of rabid wolverines. There are reasons for this. First lets get the economics out of the way.

Every argument they will throw at you is based on the analysis of convergent and efficient markets. Our market is neither. Information is not easily or equally available to everyone and the double blind nature of the market practically insures that it won't converge.

Two the argument that flippers don't/can't raise prices is false. It is based on the idea that the flippers are acting to stabilize prices and not raise them. It is also based on the idea that flippers are correcting time variation in prices. What is actually the case is that flippers compete to get the goods listed by people that don't really care what they list for or just want them sold quickly.

There are explicit counter examples given a couple of threads back where two people talked about their actions cornering common salvage, raising the price and making good money at it.

Now the guide to speaking on these forums. You have to realize you are likely speaking in an honest and forthright fashion, the problem is the denizens of this board are hearing you in code.

Hear are some the translations

Fair= Deprives me of my advantages.

Flipping raises prices = Legitimate reason to restructure the market.

Its an auction not a store = If it were a store I couldn't take money off the suckers.

Our auction system is better than the ones that show you the prices = If they started showing the prices, I couldn't do things like paint the last five prices, and force people to waste time bid creeping.

If you look at your conversation here from this perspective you may see why trying to make headway with these people is pointless.

Chock full of the usual suspect nonsense which is why I am quoting this.

First error of this poster is the claim that 'every argument' thrown.

My first argument I always use is that this is a game and whining about market prices is like whining about not getting to win at Monopoly.

So we already have doused this poster's nonsense with reality.

Then we see his lie that everyone reacts in some silly rabid emotional manner. Most posts begin with pointing out the errors of the ways of people like this poster yet it is they who put their heads where sound cannot penetrate as they continue to make silly assertions like flippers starve their grandmothers.

Then he moves on to ignoring reality without addressing it by claiming that flippers do raise prices. They magically force people to pay more of course for what other explanation could there be? It surely cannot ever be demand by users.

Then he throws out the tired example where someone points out that you can mess with prices, for a short time, and he ignores that people post they lose money when this is done and it is done purely for entertainment. This is not flipping. Flippers don't flip for losses.

I could go on pointing out the errors of reason and rationale of this poster but really there is no point as it would surely ignore my post's logic and claim I am defending the flippers because I am one which I am not.

Of course then this poster would say I am lying, which I am not.

Of course I made my inf over the years recognizing that flippers buy at X and sell at Y so I bid a little over X and listed my sales for 75-80% of Y so I would make my sales. That anyone with an ounce of intelligence could figure this out and do it is not "fair" to a poster like this for these ingame items deprive them and the mythical casual player of food, shelter and human comforts.

The final point is people who complain about the market do it purely for selfish reasons and usually are lying about trying to help some non-existent "casual" player who knows they want PvP IOs in their build but aren't expected to do any research into how the market works or to justify by what right they have to get anything sold on the market over any other person who is willing to outbid them.

Meanwhile the pro-flipper posters are forthright and honest about their self interests when asked. So who's the liar again?

Please try to make sense when you post.

Right. It makes trading easier... That is all it does, and there is no fundamental
difference between the two approaches except time and efficiency.

Amazingly enough, just like the inflation post, the entire point of that went
whizzing past your head - Perhaps a Reticle: Perception IO would help.

In the meantime, I will bow before the wisdom of Ron White and call this
a done deal...


4

This tells me that Mr. Zero doesn't quite understand how the COH auction house actually works and that he is under the impression that the market is FI/FO.

The knowledge that the lowest SELLER gets the bid from the HIGHEST buyer might be a step in the right direction.

I won't say he is lying.

I'll let these people do it.

Why did anyone need to PvP in the first place?

Why did people need to show off their costumes?

Why did people need to RP?

Why did people need to race to 50?

Why did people need to get all the badges first?

Why does there have to be a universal need in order for some players to do something in a game?

But what did you need?

I didn't need costume recipes but people were paying insane amounts on them until the devs upped the drop rate. If I did need them, I wouldn't have been able to afford them.

How rich were you when the markets launched? I only had 20 million combined across all my characters. I never bought Luck Charms back then (hero side) because they were more than I could afford. Did I give up? No I went and sold them as they dropped for me so I could use TOs and then SOs on my characters.

Did you ever try to get Field Crafter? If you did how did you not struggle for market slots?

Did you ever have a villain and have to leave up your bids/listings for weeks/months until they filled? (not that any flippers ever helped me there)

Actually, he screwed it up worse than that. With the TV that sells regularly for $600, and is on sale on Black Friday for $400, the flipper buys a bunch at $400, then sells them for something less than $600. The only way he could sell as high as $600 would be if those TVs were completely unavailable from retailers.

So. If the retailers have no more TVs, the flipper is providing availability of something which was otherwise unavailable. (You might argue they would have been available without the flipper, but it's not likely -- the $400 TVs would have sold out regardless, so what really happens is some people trying to snipe the Black Friday deal didn't succeed, but the flipper has genuinely created availability for people willing to pay $600.)

If the retailers do have TVs, the flipper is selling TVs for less than $600, and people are getting a better deal. Not as good a deal as the Black Friday deal, but they don't have to spend an hour looking for a parking spot.

Something to do?

It happens constantly to me if I actively play a character and try to sell drops I don't have storage space for.

nothing in this game is necessary.

players pursue activities they enjoy.

No! YOU FORCE them to buy your evilly overpriced flipped goods!

Blimey where was you playing because when the market first launched i can remember getting lotg 7.5's for 35mill.

As things progressed with the market, people had to either carry on the way they always played or enter into a market style game which for everyone it's not there cup of tea, unfortunately this has left some behind on the inf stakes, this isn't the players fault, some don't like the market, i know I am one that it grates me to enter the market as I do this for a living and the thought of working all day long on a market based occupation to come home on my free time to play a game that involves marketing or be left behind.

What the !#@*!#?

Total supply and demand should be unchanged by the merger. We'd expect to see more stability, but no change at all in supply or demand per se. Why on earth would you expect a merger to change the supply/demand totals? It might even them out, but it wouldn't change them.

Before merger:
10 million things wanted red side, 8 million available things red side.
20 million things wanted blue side, 16 million available things blue side.

After merger:
30 million things wanted, 24 million available things.

This should not significantly change prices.

Stabilizing is exactly what we'd expect. However, the market merger was not alone event. At the same time, other things happened:

* Many people came back to the game and started playing new low-level characters.
* A-merits were introduced, massively increasing availability of many desireable high-end recipes like LotG +recharge.
* An AE exploit was found, and then another one which they haven't fixed yet, creating a HUGE flood of rare salvage (25-40 and 41-50) and a HUGE shortage of common salvage, plus a huge flood of inf.

Not when demand is also going up.

Do you understand that "supply" and "demand" are two things, and that both of them participate in setting prices? An increase in supply only lowers prices if demand is completely unchanged.

I would like to see someone build an alot out of common sense.

The problem is, people with "common sense" who "can see whats happening" [sic.] are often wrong. But, since they are relying on untrained and unsupported intuition (also called "common sense"), they have no argumentation, nor evidence, nor any way to check or verify their beliefs. So they remain firmly committed to something obvious that common sense supports.

Consider that "common sense" tells us that heavier than air flight should be impossible, that it should not be possible for a boat sailing down wind to make better time than the wind does (not just better speed in some other direction, but better time in the direction that the wind is going), and that there is no reason for a correlation between shoe size and spelling test scores. However, common sense is wrong about all of these.

You're forgetting that while the merge increased supply it also increased demand. The general theory (which seems to be supported by the data) is that average prices would be reasonably close to the hero side prices since that makes up a larger portion of both the supply and the demand (and the villain side problems were caused mostly be a lack of confidence in the market).

The introduction of A-Merits has caused some changes in relative pricing, mostly a decrease in the cost of high end rares (because people are buying them with A-Merits) and an increase in the price of purples (trading A-Merits for high end rare recipes means people have more income and spend less of it on high end rares leaving more for purples). Most of the mid-range rares seem to have remained steady or dropped a bit in price due to increased supply.

Ok, I'm curious, what's the correlation? The only thing I can think of is that on the same test older students (i.e. teenagers or adults) will generally do better than little kids and in general will also have larger feet (due to being older). Is that it or is there something else?

That is indeed it. Since we group kids by age, there end up necessarily being pairs of kids 11 months apart in the same grade, and the older ones tend to do better, and be bigger.

I did not forget that, like I said people will always supply more then they demand, due to recieving wanted drops without the use of the market, what they have left over they will either delete or throw on market to sell, the average player will spend alot more time at the market selling his drops than purchasing from it.

You will get some players that wait till 47 before IO'ing up but in the 47 lvls previous once they hit salvage/recipe caps it's instantly off to market to empty up without stopping to purchase items.

Thats a fair few items being placed causing supply rather than demand.

Demand will normally arise once the player has hit 47+, but still he will be creating supply in the meantime.

What is it 92 slots you can place slots in so in theory thats 92 recipes with if i round up 460 salvage needed, over the course of 50 that alt should create more salvage and recipes than that even if he was to delete half of his drops.

If that's true, though, it's just as true of a small market as a large one.

What controls prices is not absolute difference between supply and demand, but ratio.

I think I see where you've gone wrong. Imagine that we have 10 items available, and 8 are demanded. That's a 5:4 ratio, and 2 absolute excess. Now imagine instead 10,000 items available, and 8,000 demanded. That's still a 5:4 ratio, but it's now 2,000 absolute excess.

You're apparently assuming that the 2,000 absolute excess will push prices down further than the 2 absolute excess, but that's not how markets work; what's relevant is the 5:4 ratio.

That assumes all recipes are equally desirable. There are plenty of rarer recipes that a character (or a player) will desire to consume in excess of their supply. From the point of view of rare recipes (purples, PvPIOs, LotG 7.5s, Numina/Miracle uniques etc.) I know for certain that I've consumed (i.e. slotted) more than I've produced. Even for recipes that aren't particularly rare I suspect I've slotted more of the desirable ones (i.e. Positron's Blast, Obliteration etc.) than I've produced.