On the nature of ebil and marketeering

I agree on the "if" part, but I can't think of anything the devs have said or done that suggests they feel any need to drain money out of the system as a way of dealing with inflation.

What they seem to have done is to increase supply by making "upper middle-class" IOs like Numena and Miracle +Recovery available for just two A-merits. This effectively makes them much more available and therefor cheaper. I certainly was not able to afford them before without spending a lot of time playing the market, and now I can just for doing a few tip missions.

Engaging for you maybe. But judging from the complaints you hear about the Blind Bidding system it seems you are in the minority.

You like the AH as a mini game, a lot of people don't. Add to that the amount it gets abused and I'm really struggling for a reason to keep it.

I know that's what you meant. My point is that it doesn't actually change anything. The profit form any form of marketeering comes not from people unable to see prices but from price fluctuations over time. Allowing a buyer to see the exact price of an item when they are paying BUY IT NAO prices might same them maybe 10% of the price (based on how much people seem to overpay me by). Allowing them to see what the highs and lows were over the last 24 hours would save them quite a bit more (up to about 50% on most of the mid-range rare IOs) and decrease market volatility (well it would if we assume the majority of buyers are patient).

Rent seeking profits are very much against the interests of the free market and detrimental to the economy as a whole. Both in CoH and real life.

What complaints?
On the forum richter scale whining about the price history doesn't even register.

What, you think the buyers are "abusing" the sellers by not bothering to bid creep and giving them too much inf?

Interesting!

So lets do away with the big creep and get everything out into the open. I'm sure the talented marketeers will still be able to make massive profits. I have over 100,000 gold in WoW so the system can work very well for smart sellers. Fighting undercutters, controlling supply, predicting supply spikes and future demand curves, I have done it all.

In real life maybe, much less so in CoH. Market slots are a limited resource, and a marketeer is effectively acting as a wholesaler or distributor. They buy up small quantities of goods from multiple other players who want to sell quickly and then store them until the market needs them (using up their market slots in the process).

WoW's prices are very stable. If you have a page of sales at X price any new seller is not going to list a double the going rate are they? What you do is undercut the cheapest price by 1 copper, ideally just before raid time, so that the other seller won't get back to see it for an hour or two.

I have 7 toons sitting next to BMs/WWs. I have no lack of slots.

As for your marketing example you can do that on a open bidding system as well. Several times I have stockpile materials on my bank alts in WoW in preparation for a new patch.

hmmm. I'll grant you that in RL (though I suspect it goes on far, far more than anyone cares to admit given my seat in the economic food chain - because really, what is fair mark up?).

Given that nothing in CoH has anything really to do with adding real value (except perhaps crafting that IO for sale). What is the acceptable markup for my having received an purple drop just because I shook that rikti extra hard? So is anything sold for higher than the enh store price by definition rent seeking? That seems a notable fallacy.

If I have the uber-rare-hard-to-find-essence-of-hair-flipping it is eminently free market to set what price I want to sell it. If it seems unfair that I set a price beyond your means... so be it. I do not have to sell it all. Just because someone else's means may be higher, does not mean the market is unfair.

Or are you assigning specific efforts of some flippers to monopolize supply/demand of certain salvage being in the category of rent seeking. There the terms seems appropriate, but cannot be assigned by extension to the entire market, no differently than copyright by itself is pure rent seeking just because some corporations attempt to manipulate its requirements for their own gain.

No one had a problem dropping ridiculous amounts for costume recipes when the market first introduced. But now, everyone gets all upset.

(And cluttering things up with a long list of prices doesn't mean my posting price will change a bit, or that the actions of any manipulators would either... in fact it may work to their advantage as 1,000s of entries of their price points would still mask the realistic pricing as much as today. And take more work to decipher. I have tried some MMOs that use that style... I hated wading through the mess and walked away.)

Different situation though, the supply of most regularly traded goods is significantly more stable so there is less natural volatility in prices. Goods are produced at relatively constant rates by performing specific activities that will produce specific goods. In CoX goods are only produced by random drops so the supply of a specific item will rise and fall quiet significantly over time. If I want (for example) some Impervium I can't simply get on my Miner go and find an Impervium vein and mine it for Impervium, I have to fight enemies that have it on their drop table.

You can see this (to some extent) in CoX, goods which players can specifically produce (primarily crafted IOs) exhibit much less variation in pricing than goods which are produced by random drops.

I don't hugely object to showing exact pricing my point is that it won't have the effect you think it will. Most players who overpay don't overpay because they can't see the exact price, they overpay because they either don't realize or don't care that they can get a better price by waiting.

There's no reason to, the system works great and is more actively engaging than the most popular alternative.

Rise and fall, sure but ultimately, as it is random, it should stay stable, right?

Or duck into AE and treat it like and Impervium mine. Run a fun story arc and cash in some tickets on... Impervium. I do it a lot. Works a trick.

Emphasis added.

I was able to use the exact same tricks I perfected here in 'that other game' with similar results.

Well, it inflates because of the huge rate of inf creation, but apart from that, usually yes.

Changes in relative supply do chance prices, mind.

I was speaking of the 'supply' rather than the 'price' but yes, realistically other than the efforts of the 88s inf is only created.

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At least one person has called it that. It doesn't seem to me to be accurate.

It's not at all obvious that "manipulating" is profitable, compared to other forms of participation.

In particular, with recipes and salvage, flippers are clearly improving market stability by increasing the number of bids/listings available, because they are putting whole stacks in each WW slot. With crafted enhancements, bids can still be on stacks, but listings can't, which creates some asymmetry, but it still increases availability.

You equate "flipping" and "manipulation", but since you do it with a parenthetical rather than an explicit statement that you think they're the same, it'd be easy for someone to think that you were trying to hide the weak premise, rather than putting it out as an assertion in and of itself. However, it's very definitely an assertion, and it's a contested one.

Consider, if you will, the grocery store. If everyone ran grocery stores, and no one farmed (literally), we would of course have no food. Does this tell us that grocery stores are "manipulating", because they do nothing but buy goods and resell them? I don't think it does. It seems to me that grocery stores add a kind of value, even though they don't necessarily do ANYTHING to modify the goods they sell. (I know some repackage things, or have a deli, but we can ignore that and focus on what they do to forklift-loads of Kraft Mac&Cheese.)

When I have a bunch of junk in my salvage inventory and don't really care about it, I tend to list it all for 1 inf. If flippers are buying it, great! They're ensuring that there's a steady supply of bids on that salvage, so I get my market slots back immediately. Instead of waiting for the next person to come along, I get an instant sale. The only time that sale goes to a flipper is when the flipper was bidding more than anyone else was when I listed. So every time I sell to a flipper, I come out ahead of where I would have been without the flipper. If I sell to a non-flipper, I'm probably getting a more stable price anyway, because the flippers have nudged that item's price towards a stable center point.

So I think you've got a major assumption here that's been carefully presented as an assumed premise, when really, it looks like a thesis statement you ought to be presenting and supporting in its own right.

Beautifully stated.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Do you have proof that flippers are increasing the number of listings? It seems to me they are simply buying something and raising the price, keeping the number of listings the same.
Is there evidence that people don't have enough slots to sell everything they want to?
If anything, the people who list things for absurdly large sums that don't sell are increasing supply, not that that's a good thing.


Why is selling for a more stable price of any value to the seller? Why not simply list something for what you think its worth. You're playing the passive style that Nethergoat seems to dislike. Do the work, reap the rewards,

It's self-evident. Flippers (usually) buy things that the original sellers don't care that much about, because obviously if the seller cared more about them, then he'd have set his price higher.

Then the flippers turn those items around for a profit when demand is higher. They're stabilizing supply against demand. If there's an over-arching downside to the actions of flippers, then it comes (ironically) from a lack of competing flippers to drive the potential profit margins down.

My Level 50 Tanker has 57 slots in his salvage inventory, and (IIRC) 26 slots in his recipe inventory. That same character has 18 market slots. If I want to sell a full load of my goods, then I need at least my low-tier salvage to move quickly.

Is arithmetic evidence? I think so. Your mileage may vary.

This is usually the point at which anti-marketeer posters argue that you can use alts and personal bases to circumvent the built-in limits on inventory and market slots. But that argument jumps the shark, because the so-called pro-casual crowd should understand that a casual player isn't going to go to those lengths. If all you want to do is play the game normally and sell your drops, then you want to your market slots to have high turnaround.

That argument is, in effect, using a loophole in the system to argue against what they consider to be another loophole (flipping). The system was clearly designed to encourage market participation through inventory/market-slot limits.

Why is a grocery store any value to the consumer or the farmer? For that matter, isn't any investment technically an example of flipping?

The thing that confuses me about these arguments is that everyone seems to forget that buyers and sellers are not mutually exclusive. Anything that benefits the seller tends to benefit the buyer too. As in real life, the seller benefits from anything that makes his product move faster. The buyer benefits from having easier access to a wider variety of competing goods and services. And that goes double in CoH, where everyone has equal capacity to produce the goods.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

They're recirculating junk that would otherwise have disappeared, and they deal in volume. Not only are they personally increasing listings, they're inspiring others to list as well- the better the return people can get on their junk, the more motivated they are to sell it.

When I was messing around with Ancient Bones a few years back supply/bids went from, roughly, 0-100 listings and 0-20 bids to 2-3k listings and 500-1k bids. Once I stopped 'working' the niche it quickly returned to its former state.

People know they can get 100k or so for an Alchemical Silver.
This encourages them to seek out and list Alchemical Silvers.

Meanwhile if someone checked Circuit Boards at the wrong time they'd figure it was junk salvage and start deleting them.

A stable, worthwhile price point gets the word out to sellers that yes, Widget X is worth selling.