On the nature of ebil and marketeering
By
1VB_FIST,
Posted on: 2010-11-13 21:46 in The Market and Inventions
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Is there a rule that it has to be a certain amount?
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Originally Posted by Lohenien
Yes the low end comes up, because it TOO LOW.
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you put them up at 70 million that is why you fail. I've been flipping them for the last week and a half from 37m to 45m. Yours will never sell if I do not leave the niche. That is why you must pvp with me to earn the sales. You want to sell your stock ? List it lower than I do.
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Originally Posted by Max_zero
Just for the record I got around 14 Regenerative Tissue recipes through AE tickets and crafted and put them up at 70 mil.
If you check the amount for sale there is a bit of a glut of them. It's why the price dropped. |
I am an ebil markeeter and will steal your moneiz ...correction stole your moneiz. I support keeping the poor down because it is impossible to make moneiz in this game.
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Because higher average prices draw more sellers. More sellers is more supply. More supply drives prices down.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
Why would it?
If there a low prices, medium prices and high prices how does turning the low prices into medium prices cause the high prices to fall? Please point out the economic principle that supports that. You cause and effect has absolutely no link. You add 3-4 million to the lowest priced IOs and say it lowers the highest price?! All you have done is raise the average price. |
And again, the flipper must have enough breathing room to have the lowest bid at a given moment in time. He can't just arbitrarily list at the highest possible price, or he'll take a bath. The more active the market is -- the more flippers there are competing over a given niche, in fact -- the more prices stabilize. Eventually, the flipper(s) will be driven from their niche when it's no longer profitable, and the cycle begins anew. Flippers are basically roving market stimulators.
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| If you check the amount for sale there is a bit of a glut of them. It's why the price dropped. |
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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That's why rent seeking is considered bad by every single economist.
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Originally Posted by Obitus
That's cute. Selective editing for the win. What if I just posted your above quote with the 'not' edited out?
 Your addition has no reasoning to back it up. History, logic, and common sense all stand firmly against you. The game's mechanics stand against you, too. What part of "the lowest asking price fills the highest bid" don't you understand? The flipper is called a flipper because he plays within the margin of error created by a lack of market activity. He can't simply decide what the prices are going to be. He has to have enough room and enough inactivity that he can sneak in the highest consistent bids and the lowest consistent listings to turn his market slots around in a timely fashion. This is all self-evident and irrefutable. |
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Originally Posted by Obitus
That's cute. Selective editing for the win. What if I just posted your above quote with the 'not' edited out?
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I dont know what the term is called but pulling one line out of context, quoting it and refuting it, while ignoring the framework its a part of, seems bush league and troll-like to me.
Ive been polite but Im about done with this discussion if thats the way things are going to go.
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If someone is selling it for less, the more expensive item will never sell. So even if those prices stay high, they will never be bought.
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Originally Posted by Max_zero
Why would it?
If there a low prices, medium prices and high prices how does turning the low prices into medium prices cause the high prices to fall? Please point out the economic principle that supports that. |
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Yes, lol, competition for customers is a bad thing. See what I did there? Ignoring content and saying whatever the heck you want may be a fun way to pass the time, but you're not going to convince anyone of anything by doing it.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
That's why rent seeking is considered bad by every single economist.
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Scratch that. In order to ignore the content of your post, there'd have to be some content to begin with. Enjoy your Koolaid, oh great populist agitator. Oh, and enjoy the 49 million (0.05 * 70 * 14) in frustrated listing fees your Regenerative Tissues will give you. Might wanna learn how the market actually works before you pontificate about how easy it is to raise prices.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Yes. The normal price amounts are determined over time by supply and demand. Lazy people throw the equations off, while flippers restore values to normal levels.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
Is there a rule that it has to be a certain amount?
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You want to charge people an insane 70 million for regen tissues. I'm only charging 45 million. The floor on those ? 37 million. Why ? Because thats the floor I've set so long as I keep my bids there. Other people are bidding at 35 and 36 million. If they want to out bid me that will bring the price closer to the middle value of 40-45 million. This means the value of that IO has been shown to be 40-45m.
I am an ebil markeeter and will steal your moneiz ...correction stole your moneiz. I support keeping the poor down because it is impossible to make moneiz in this game.
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Now the names start.
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Originally Posted by Obitus
Yes, lol, competition for customers is a bad thing. See what I did there? Ignoring content and saying whatever the heck you want may be a fun way to pass the time, but you're not going to convince anyone of anything by doing it.
Scratch that. In order to ignore the content of your post, there'd have to be some content to begin with. Enjoy your Koolaid, oh great populist agitator. |
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And yet more flippers wont lower the price....Brain asplodey
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Originally Posted by Lohenien
you put them up at 70 million that is why you fail. I've been flipping them for the last week and a half from 37m to 45m. Yours will never sell if I do not leave the niche. That is why you must pvp with me to earn the sales. You want to sell your stock ? List it lower than I do.
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Lazy people? If all prices were shown then the lowest shown would be the floor not what you arbitrarily decide it to be.
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Originally Posted by Lohenien
Yes. The normal price amounts are determined over time by supply and demand. Lazy people throw the equations off, while flippers restore values to normal levels.
You want to charge people an insane 70 million for regen tissues. I'm only charging 45 million. The floor on those ? 37 million. Why ? Because thats the floor I've set so long as I keep my bids there. Other people are bidding at 35 and 36 million. If they want to out bid me that will bring the price closer to the middle value of 40-45 million. This means the value of that IO has been shown to be 40-45m. |
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Oh, and equating in-game marketeers with Goldman Sachs wasn't an ad hominem? Your tears are delicious.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
Now the names start.
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At least my name (which was fairly mild) came with supporting argument and reasoning. Yours was a smoke-and-mirrors attempt to argue by assertion. You still have yet to explain how flippers can't lower prices when the market gives preference to the lowest asking price. And you're still stuck with 14 Regenerative Tissues at a price for which they won't sell.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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This is a false conclusion, based on the erroneous conclusion that "cost" is determined by what the flipper sold the item at.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
Yes but the fact is if the flipper wants to make a profit his relisted price HAS to be higher then the price he bought it for. No matter how you slice it the flipper makes the IO cost more.
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As has been mentioned by other posters, the price for items on the market fluctuates. What's the "price" of something which has a sales history of something like this?
100,000
55,
101
1001
1001
Is the "price" 55? 100k? I think everyone knows it's probably none of those. Most likely it's somewhere in between the extremes. When people here say flippers don't raise the price, that middle-ground price is the price they're talking about.
A flipper does raise the price floor at which a patient buyer can buy things, because you have to outbid the flipper. But if we're talking about truly patient buyers here, they have two patient approaches. One is to try to "out-patient" the flipper - you can bid less than the flipper's price floor and try to wait out their bidding. The other is to use the price history to glean the bidder's price floor and bid that +1 inf. By definition, if you're trying to get a bargain by being patient, you are willing to wait. The flipper may force you to move your chosen time vs. price target.
Note that the above assumes a product that's actually operating around the price that the market will bear. If that's not the case, any seller can move the price upwards. This happens with new IOs whose true market value hasn't been realized, and it can also happen when there is an increase in supply of Inf in the system (like, oh, now).
How does this work? It's pretty simple. The price history tends to make prices "sticky". People see the price history and a lot of them tend to both sell and bid near the history. However, there may be people willing to pay much more than the price history indicates, but who don't have to pay as much as they're willing to because the price is "stuck" lower. But if supply becomes low, these people will start bidding higher, moving towards their personal "cap" on what they are willing to pay. If they actually manage to buy the product, this higher sale price will appear in the history, and the race is on. The essence of this has been captured in the past by folks observing that the price on anything with zero for sale can probably be raised. The observation is that if there are none for sale, someone probably is bidding (or will bid in the future) more than any bid presently in the history. There was a whole thread about people testing the theory and finding it held up very well.
So if you come into this situation and manage to buy one of the few items that drops, you can almost certainly resell it for higher than you bought it for. If you set about doing this consistently, you're probably raising both the price floor and the price ceiling, and thus the "true" price.
Now, arguably, someone "flipping" prices higher in a situation like this isn't a "flipper" in the sense the term is usually used around here. A "true" flipper tries to keep their list price just under most everyone else's to make sure they get the sale. The activity I'm describing requires one to list intentionally above other sellers prices in an effort to get as much profit per sale as possible, instead of getting the most sales per unit time.
It's worth pointing out, though, that you don't have to flip stuff in this environment to make the price go up. If someone comes along with one of these widgets they got the hard way and lists at an ambitious price, that too can "un-stick" the price. As with more "traditional" flipping, putting a flipper in the picture drives the market price towards an item's "true" market value faster.
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
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Originally Posted by Max_zero
Lazy people? If all prices were shown then the lowest shown would be the floor not what you arbitrarily decide it to be.
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Hold on.....Yes!!!! We just hit the point where the seller sets the market and not the buyer.....and we've come full circle.
I just finished reading it and it's the same tired and mistaken POV that flippers are bad.
element 1: only focus on high end buying prices and ignore the vast majority of the items in the market left un-flipped
element 2: always assume all items will always be available for immediate cheap amount which is only true of ingame garbage drops
element 3: only focus on buying detriment as equated to inf and ignore buying benefit of time not spent waiting for a bid to fill
element 4: always ignore benefit of seller who is not flipping
element 5: use real life examples that relate in no way to a game while ignoring all long existing game examples like Monopoly
element 6: ignore all ingame causes of excessive inf generation that would raise prices of only useful items yet never impact ingame garbage drops
element 7: assume all opposing arguments are only made by flippers trying to protect their turf
element 8: ignore bidder's ability to leave a bid or listing up and beat the flippers or to put it another way ignore impatience of complainers effect on prices in the market
element 9: ignore all ingame avenues to beat flippers like merits and tickets
element 10 (optional): cut and paste quoting to "prove" point
Result: move to ignore file once they are no longer entertaining in their nonsense
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Originally Posted by SwellGuy
I just finished reading it and it's the same tired and mistaken POV that flippers are bad.
element 1: only focus on high end buying prices and ignore the vast majority of the items in the market left un-flipped element 2: always assume all items will always be available for immediate cheap amount which is only true of ingame garbage drops element 3: only focus on buying detriment as equated to inf and ignore buying benefit of time not spent waiting for a bid to fill element 4: always ignore benefit of seller who is not flipping element 5: use real life examples that relate in no way to a game while ignoring all long existing game examples like Monopoly element 6: ignore all ingame causes of excessive inf generation that would raise prices of only useful items yet never impact ingame garbage drops element 7: assume all opposing arguments are only made by flippers trying to protect their turf element 8: ignore bidder's ability to leave a bid or listing up and beat the flippers or to put it another way ignore impatience of complainers effect on prices in the market element 9: ignore all ingame avenues to beat flippers like merits and tickets element 10 (optional): cut and paste quoting to "prove" point Result: move to ignore file once they are no longer entertaining in their nonsense |
Plus it's always entertaining when factual observations are prohibited & punished while the behavior that inspires them is totally ignored, to the detriment of the forum.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I have to admit I've been a lot happier since I started watching Spongbob with my kids a couple years ago.
But now so you too can join in my Imaginarium all anti-flippers shall be viewed as Plankton railing against evil Krabs and his Krusty Krab success or you may imagine them as Squidward sullen and whiny while Patrick and I laugh and enjoy life.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
What a bunch of nonsense. The other day I logged onto a character I hadn't used in months to find that all of the recipes/salvage I had posted had sold for hundreds of millions of influence, far more than they were worth at the time.
There was nothing clever or insightful about my speculation when I posted them, I just figured I couldn't be bothered to log on that character for a while so I would set everything to a prices people would only pay at the most desperate of times. Conversely you can buy anything you want as a (relatively) reasonable price if you're willing to lowball it as long as your bid is just above the speculators' offers.
When I buy items I'm not benefiting from scarcity mitigation provided by the speculators. I'm just stuck waiting an extra hour, day, or week until all the other people who will actually use the item and outbid me get theirs. Marketeers only provide artificial supply levels to other marketeers who are willing to spend 2-10x as much money to get the recipe immediately.
I'm sure you're saying to yourself that I have only reinforced your point, that time is the true commodity and people pay for it accordingly. If that is the case, then I would liken it to forcing people to rent their travel powers instead of spec them. Why not? It's only time. Why not slow down the pace of leveling by 30%, or add in any other artificial time sink? You could even add a player element to it, maybe restrict the number of players who can train at any given location, so that players have to queue up and wait their turn? Heck, maybe even a ticket system could be implemented and you could auction off leveling up appointments.
When it comes down to it you're wasting people's time, and pretending to offer them a service while you're at it. If I were in charge there would be some pretty major changes to prevent you from doing that, but I don't blame you for using the system as-is. The people who play the game by arbitrary and fictitious rules for the sake of being self-righteous are always going to get frustrated by people who play the game the way it really is. Don't kid yourself though, the idea that you provide stability or any other reasonable service is ridiculous.
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I confess I cannot follow your point(s) here however it seems to me that you are on the anti-flipper side since you say if you were in charge you would make major changes to prevent someone from doing something.|
Originally Posted by StabBot
What a bunch of nonsense. The other day I logged onto a character I hadn't used in months to find that all of the recipes/salvage I had posted had sold for hundreds of millions of influence, far more than they were worth at the time.
There was nothing clever or insightful about my speculation when I posted them, I just figured I couldn't be bothered to log on that character for a while so I would set everything to a prices people would only pay at the most desperate of times. Conversely you can buy anything you want as a (relatively) reasonable price if you're willing to lowball it as long as your bid is just above the speculators' offers. When I buy items I'm not benefiting from scarcity mitigation provided by the speculators. I'm just stuck waiting an extra hour, day, or week until all the other people who will actually use the item and outbid me get theirs. I'm sure you're saying to yourself that I have only reinforced your point, that time is the true commodity and people pay for it accordingly. If that is the case, then I would liken it to forcing people to rent their travel powers instead of spec them. Why not? It's only time. When it comes down to it you're wasting people's time, and pretending to offer them a service while you're at it. If I were in charge there would be some pretty major changes to prevent you from doing that, but I don't blame you for using the system as-is. The people who play the game by arbitrary and fictitious rules for the sake of being self-righteous are always going to get frustrated by people who play the game the way it really is. Don't kid yourself though, the idea that you provide stability or any other reasonable service is ridiculous. |
"wasting people's time". No matter how you slice it this is not universally true.
Some people come to the market to list items and make bids while some come to buy and sell. There is a difference between those actions that most seem too ignorant to grasp and what it boils down to is the mindset of the buyers/sellers is to NOT leave up bids on items. If they cannot buy it now for what they want to pay they fume and if it doesn't sell now for a price they like they are unhappy.
The bidder/lister goes in not expecting immediate gratification of a purchase or sale.
You may believe that the first group is more important than the second group but stores vs markets indicate a developer interest is not on your side.
However even in the sell/buy-it-now crowd there are distinct attitudes and views. For example I don't care what I get as long as it is more than my floor and I don't care what it costs up to my personal ceiling. Floors and ceilings vary by every player.
So you cannot afford an alchemical silver at 100k? I don't care. I can and I want it now and I don't want the quantity to be 0 so you can have it at 250 whenever someone bothers to sell it.
You cannot afford a Panacea proc at 2 Billion? Again. I don't care. I can and I want it now when I want it and I am willing to pay for it.
So in the world of people willing to pay more to get it now versus those who think some group moving the items from the quick sellers to the buyers willing to pay are bad I laugh and get my stuff and I don't care about those fretting they cannot buy it now.
Leave up a reasonable bid or go get one as a drop or go earn merits or tickets to buy your own if the price bugs you. Me? I will do that if I want or I'll pay the "high" prices.
But what you want does not trump what I want just because you cannot "afford" the good stuff. It's a game and I have the inf and interest to get what I want. I win.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Well, hang on.|
Originally Posted by Intrinsic
A couple of months ago, I could have pointed to even more examples in common and uncommon salvage. This does not look like a market that is constrained by inventory.
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Why could you have pointed to more examples a couple of months ago, but you can point to fewer examples now?
Sounds to me like some parts of the market are constrained by inventory. Certainly, I know I am -- I regularly end up with characters that have no free WW slots. And as a result, I vendor some salvage I might otherwise sell. Being a bit of a market-watcher, I can sort of favor selling stuff that's worth something, but that doesn't necessarily work for people who don't watch the market so much.
While there are certainly some examples of things where inventory constraints are not significant, there are others where it looks as though they might be. For instance, many mid-level recipes. If there happens not to be a bidder right now, listing a mid-level recipe is usually a guaranteed loss of a slot for a week or two. Same for many mid-level enhancements. And then, when I want to go buy stuff, there's none listed because people didn't have the slots to list them.
Basically, common salvage is just that -- common. There's not usually much of an issue with inventory constraints on it. Sometimes there might be. However, there are a lot more recipes than kinds of salvage, and on recipes, inventory constraints become an issue.
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You're mixing market forces here.| What a bunch of nonsense. The other day I logged onto a character I hadn't used in months to find that all of the recipes/salvage I had posted had sold for hundreds of millions of influence, far more than they were worth at the time. |
When I was a teenager, gas was 50 cents a gallon... Anybody trying to
sell at $2.50 a gallon would have sat on their supply for a long time.
When I started actively marketing common IO's, L35 Damages were going
for 125K... If you'd have listed them at 450K, they'd have sat there for a
long time.
Today, in both cases, selling at those prices now would be a deal...
The force at work in your case is "inflation", pure and simple and it explains
why the items you listed didn't sell then, but have sold now...
Regards,
4
As for Max, your understanding of economics is woefully inadequate. While
that's not uncommon, it makes a discussion about it pointless, so I will
simply say that flipping doesn't work the way you believe it does...
Since we just went through all this foolishness with Blue_Centurion less
than a week ago, I'd rather poke my eyes out than try to talk simple
economics with you...
GL, Have Fun, Bye Bye.
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
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And yet, no one's provided even a shred of evidence that "flipping" is a kind of "rent seeking". The key is the lack of anything even remotely analagous to monopolizing, regulating, or abusing law to create a new market.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
That's why rent seeking is considered bad by every single economist.
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... Also, I have trouble believing that it's considered bad by "every single economist". Have you ever MET an economist? If you ask two economists a question, you get on average three answers. There is almost certainly at least one economist who believes that the complete extinction of the human species would be a net positive. For you to claim that something is "considered bad by every single economist" is like claiming that a particular style of noise production is "considered bad by every single musician", only not as plausible.
Why don't you say something believable, like "every single economist thinks cats are better than dogs"?
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only if your special dictionary defines "saving" as "wasting".
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Originally Posted by StabBot
When it comes down to it you're wasting people's time....
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The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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The fact is that when you put your assertions in as parenthetical assumptions, it's a cheap rhetorical device to try to bypass the reader's sanity-checks of assertions made by presenting them as premises, and shows that your argument is weak.|
Originally Posted by Max_zero
That fact is if everyone flipped (rent seeking)
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This stupid argument was already totally rebutted by the grocery store analogy: If everyone ran a grocery store instead of farming, there would be no food. What you've missed is that there's another equally true statement: If everyone farmed instead of running a grocery store, life would suck for nearly everybody. We tried it. We couldn't maintain a written language or any kind of medical treatment or anything else, because it was so inefficient.
The fact is that if you could prove that flipping was "rent seeking", you would be able to present it as an assertion, rather than trying to sneak it in as a premise. The fact is that since you don't, a rational reader is fully justified in assuming that you cannot prove it, and that you know that you cannot prove it, and that you are specifically trying to trick people by playing rhetorical games instead of arguing for your point.
People don't engage in that kind of sleight-of-hand by accident. It's a thing you have to do on purpose -- you have to specifically decide that instead of presenting a claim, you're going to try to sneak it in. The only way you could not be doing it dishonestly is if you are genuinely incapable of comprehending that it's an assertion -- say, if it were a bit of heavily-committed dogma that is such a foundational assumption of your culture that you can't perceive it as a proposition. However, it's hard to imagine that such a thing could apply to a claim about video game economics.
But we can say this, and say it confidently: Either you are arguing in bad faith, with specific intent to use dishonest tactics to try to trick people into accepting a conclusion that you are fully aware is unsupportable by evidence or argumentation, or you are incapable of comprehending the issue, and thus cannot have contributions of value to make.
I am reminded of a friend who quipped, about the 2000 Presidential campaign, "this will be a tough choice, because we have a choice between a liar and an idiot." It took people a while to realize that they couldn't tell which one was which. It took them a little longer to realize that it didn't matter.
If you check the amount for sale there is a bit of a glut of them. It's why the price dropped.
Theres always been stock on hand for those. Your observance of a glut is meaningless.
More people are buying the uncrafted version (gauging by bids and price signatures) and Im assuming theyre flipping the crafted, because the sell prices for the uncrafted are pretty stable
Your perception and mine are different
--Frog