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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Exactly. One of the reasons I have such an alt problem is that if I do five or six missions on a single character, I am likely out of market slots until I spend a while crafting and such, and even then, I'm pretty much done for the day because I have to|
Originally Posted by Obitus
Thanks for playing, StabBot. You did an excellent job reinforcing the opposing side's arguments, just as you predicted. The players who would be most inclined to whine about inflated prices are precisely the kinds of players who don't want to spend four days selling stuff every time their inventory fills from the natural pace of running missions. Like me, believe it or not.
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log out and play someone else while I wait for sales.
If there were active flippers in all niches, I would be able to play that character a lot more, because I could just list everything and get some kind of livable price for it instantly.
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I fill up my inventory in about three missions on my Tanker. Because there's no way I can sell everything I have on the market for a so-called "reasonable price" in anything like a timely fashion, I basically have to list any non-rare salvage for 1 inf. Sometimes when there's clearly a flipper (or just a lowball bidder at work), I'll gamble and make a bid at 1 inf higher than the transaction-revealed lowballer (it usually works within a few seconds).|
Originally Posted by seebs
Exactly. One of the reasons I have such an alt problem is that if I do five or six missions on a single character, I am likely out of market slots until I spend a while crafting and such, and even then, I'm pretty much done for the day because I have to
log out and play someone else while I wait for sales. If there were active flippers in all niches, I would be able to play that character a lot more, because I could just list everything and get some kind of livable price for it instantly. |
For recipes, I check the market and craft the (usually) one or two worth selling -- and I list them at like 30% below the ballpark average of the last five. The rest get vendored, because recipes just don't move very fast, generally (and jeebus, can we get Temp power drops moved to a lower priority pretty please?). On the whole, it works out pretty well. I usually have about 5-8 market slots tied up at any given time with crafted enhancements. Salvage usually sells immediately or if not, it sells while I'm running the next batch of missions. Any salvage that doesn't sell by the next time I run to the market gets pulled and relisted at 1 inf.
Oh, and lately I've been pocketing rare salvage because the prices for those are down now with the AE stuff that's going on. They get used naturally as time passes by my occasional crafting.
So anyway, all of that self-indulgent stuff aside, all of the above is why I find it utterly and flabbergastingly (lol, making up words) bizarre when people claim that inventory/market space isn't valuable. The only way I keep my casually played characters active in what these people (presumably) would consider to be the "real game" is to destroy most of my recipes.
You're spot on, as usual, and in fewer words.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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A lot of the attacks on "flipping" are based on extremely selective observations. Now, this may not be dishonest; humans are well known to have consistent problems with certain kinds of thinking. The most relevant, I think, is the availability heuristic; people tend to think that something is more likely if they can recall examples of it. For instance, many people will heavily overestimate the frequency of kidnapping, and underestimate the frequency of ****, because kidnappings are often national news. Since you can think of several kidnapped kids, it seems like kidnappings must be frequent.
Imagine, if you will, that alchemical silver had a mechanically-enforced price cap of 5k, but that it were also impossible to vendor them or to trade them any way but the market, so EVERY alchemical silver generated must be placed on the market, where it would sell for 5k or less.
The steady state of the market would be that there would be no alchemical silver for sale. You could bid 5k, and then you would maybe eventually get one -- but since everyone else is bidding 5k, and the market is not a FIFO system, you don't necessarily know whether it'll be today or next week.
As you increase the price cap, you increase the chances that a bid close to the cap will genuinely get priority over other bids, because some people won't be willing to bid the cap. This allows you to choose whether to spend more and get it sooner, or spend less and get it later.
Take away the cap entirely, and you end up with a market where you are virtually guaranteed to be able to get an alchemical silver RIGHT NOW if you are willing to pay substantially over the going rate, and also quite likely to be able to get it for a fair bit under the going rate if you are willing to wait. (I haven't gotten any for under about 50k in quite a while, though...)
In this market, what do "flippers" actually do? If they're trying to make a reasonable amount of money, they must do the following:
1. Their bid price has to be high enough that it is likely to be the highest bid at least occasionally.
2. Their listing price has to be low enough that it is likely to be the lowest listing at least occasionally.
3. The gap between bid and the amount they actually get paid has to be enough to justify the effort.
Now, there's a quirk here. There are two strategies, both of which work:
Strategy A: Maximize profit. You bid low enough that you don't get many, but your cost basis is low. You list high enough that you only sell during peak shortages, but your price is high. You get a larger profit per transaction, but fewer transactions.
Strategy B: Maximize flow. Your bid and listing prices are closer to the middle, so you have less profit per item, but you get many more transactions.
Of course, the real win is:
Strategy C: Maximize profit * flow. Figure out how much the prices affect your transaction rate, and head for the midpoint where the number of transactions times the profit per transaction is highest.
In fact, there turns out to be an interesting side-effect. Because you get the amount bid, rather than your listing price, it is quite common that strategy B *is* strategy C, because profit per item is not (list)-(cost), but (sale)-(cost).
I recently sold a few alchemical silvers. If I listed at 1inf, I sold them immediately for something in the 60-70k range. If I listed at 71k, I sold them after about ten minutes... for 111k. That 40k is enough to make for a fair amount of profit. Since I know that 70k produces an occasional purchase, I could do okay buying alchemical silvers for 70k, and listing them for 77k or so. I'd make a lot of money on a fairly high rate of flow.
Now, it's easy to assert that this "raises the price". I'm not sure, however, that it is actually true that it raises the prices people pay. Take my bids out, and people will quite likely pay 111k to the people who were listing at 70k, or even at 1inf. They are not paying the listing fee, they're paying a guess based on recent sales. If, as has been asserted, I'm neither increasing nor decreasing supply, then I'm not going to be affecting supply or demand noticably, so I shouldn't be having any effect on prices. (Except that destroying inf lowers all prices marginally.)
However, think back to the price caps analysis. What I'm doing is moving things from one category to another -- I'm moving a few things from the "low prices, sold out" category to the "high prices, still available" category. And that, it turns out, provides a useful function. I'm guaranteeing listers a reasonable price -- as long as my 70k bids are up, no one will be getting 10k because there were no outstanding bids but long-forgotten lowball bids. I'm also guaranteeing buyers a reasonable price -- as long as my 111k listings are up, no one has to pay 200k because there were no outstanding listings but long-forgotten highball listings.
Consider the implications of StabBot's story about forgetting about the alt for a long time. Non-flippers who are not planning to play a character can quite easily leave stuff up at ludicrous prices for a long time, and some day, that will be the lowest price on the market. When you complain about a flipper "raising" the price from 70k to 110k, you're missing the point; the flipper is actually lowering the price from 250k to 110k.
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But that's the thing. The reason there aren't active flippers in all niches is they can only flip things where there is a floor to ceiling ratio they can profit from.|
Originally Posted by seebs
Exactly. One of the reasons I have such an alt problem is that if I do five or six missions on a single character, I am likely out of market slots until I spend a while crafting and such, and even then, I'm pretty much done for the day because I have to
log out and play someone else while I wait for sales. If there were active flippers in all niches, I would be able to play that character a lot more, because I could just list everything and get some kind of livable price for it instantly. |
Flippers don't make niches they just move into them.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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I vendor temp powers unless they look fun -- I always list power analyzers, for instance, because they contribute to the chances that someone will post useful hard data for something I'm curious about.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
For recipes, I check the market and craft the (usually) one or two worth selling -- and I list them at like 30% below the ballpark average of the last five. The rest get vendored, because recipes just don't move very fast, generally (and jeebus, can we get Temp power drops moved to a lower priority pretty please?). On the whole, it works out pretty well. I usually have about 5-8 market slots tied up at any given time with crafted enhancements. Salvage usually sells immediately or if not, it sells while I'm running the next batch of missions. Any salvage that doesn't sell by the next time I run to the market gets pulled and relisted at 1 inf.
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For enhancements, I craft everything. I don't care whether it's worth money. It's not worth my time to think about that, it turns out! If I just craft everything without checking, I usually make a fair bit of money over salvage costs, and anything that doesn't look like it'll sell quickly otherwise, I list at 1 inf. Sometimes I get 1 inf for it. Usually I get at least a good fraction of salvage costs. But I figure, someone out there wanted that enhancement for some reason, and now they got it.
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You're insane. I like it but you're insane. |
Originally Posted by seebs
I vendor temp powers unless they look fun -- I always list power analyzers, for instance, because they contribute to the chances that someone will post useful hard data for something I'm curious about.
For enhancements, I craft everything. I don't care whether it's worth money. It's not worth my time to think about that, it turns out! If I just craft everything without checking, I usually make a fair bit of money over salvage costs, and anything that doesn't look like it'll sell quickly otherwise, I list at 1 inf. Sometimes I get 1 inf for it. Usually I get at least a good fraction of salvage costs. But I figure, someone out there wanted that enhancement for some reason, and now they got it. |
I used to do that but now I won't waste my time.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Open Letter to all the uninitiated, uninformed and incurious players who come here to share their bizarre market hallucinations with the rest of us:
You know what's valuable in this game?
Exactly one thing:
Time.
Why do people pay me 1,500,000 for rare salvage I bought for 500,000?
their time > their play money
Why do people pay 500k for a generic IO they could make for 20k?
their time > their play money
Why do people pay 100,000,000 for an IO they could make for 20,000,000?
their time > their play money
Why do people pay 100,000 for a piece of common salvage they could get for a few tickets?
their time > their play money
Until you grasp that underlying reality the market will continue to distress, confuse and anger you.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Heh, I keep the temp powers that look interesting for the character I'm playing at the time (usually the power analyzer and the recovery serum or the -regen dagger for situational hard-target fights). You raise an interesting point about spreading the power analyzer around; I'll have to sell some of those.|
Originally Posted by seebs
I vendor temp powers unless they look fun -- I always list power analyzers, for instance, because they contribute to the chances that someone will post useful hard data for something I'm curious about.
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But I figure if I'm getting on average 2 Gabriel's Hammers and/or Revolvers per run, that the market doesn't need any more. It'd be nice if they were a little rarer, is all, but that may be my bias speaking. I play concept characters -- heavily min/maxed, but they at least started with, and try to adhere to, a concept -- and so the chances that I'll ever want to use a weapon I didn't explicitly plan my build around are pretty slim.
As for crafting enhancemnts, I just can't be bothered to craft more than two or three at a time, mostly because my enhancement inventory is also usually storing something or other that I deem important.
Anyway, enough of my personal quirks and habits. The point is that market slots are precious for anyone who's not interested in playing alt-inventory accountant with their time. Oddly enough, those are the very same people that anti-marketeers most often claim to be representing.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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I have a spreadsheet showing which characters have open WW slots and recipe slots.
Oh, and according to my spreadsheet, my total across all characters is just over 2B, though I haven't got anyone with over about 300M.
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Hehe, you wearing your accountant-issue green eye shade? |
Originally Posted by seebs
I have a spreadsheet showing which characters have open WW slots and recipe slots.
Oh, and according to my spreadsheet, my total across all characters is just over 2B, though I haven't got anyone with over about 300M. |
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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You crazy@!|
Originally Posted by seebs
I have a spreadsheet showing which characters have open WW slots and recipe slots.
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I use a more holistic approach- I delete junk, craft the good stuff and dump it all in base storage. Come the weekend, my legion of alts mainlines it into the market. Junk that doesn't sell I leave up until until I need the slots for my next wave of listings.
Profits are forwarded to the 88s to heat the base.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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I think there's a critical difference. The cost of keeping a hundred million barrels of oil (or whatever amount it would take to affect the market) in a facility rated for hazardous material storage would be quite expensive, in fact I don't even think you could turn a profit on it.|
You're mixing market forces here. 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. |
The fact that auctions never expire, and fail to do so at no expense to the seller is probably one of the largest contributors to the current state of the market. That being said, if there were time limits on auctions I suspect there would be no market for unpopular sets or moderately popular ones at odd level ranges. Putting up an item you didn't expect to sell would be a losing prospect, assuming you lost your auction house fee each time you reposted it.
So clearly a broad rule causing all auctions to expire every 72 hours wouldn't be a good thing, but I think it's clear that the top end of the marketeering racket needs some serious review. It's a shame that logging how often an item is resold would be such a massive tax on the game's databases.
At the very least it would be helpful if instead of showing the last 5 purchases it would show the average value of the last 50 in increments of 10.
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Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you. |
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Open Letter to all the uninitiated, uninformed and incurious players who come here to share their bizarre market hallucinations with the rest of us:
You know what's valuable in this game? Exactly one thing: Time. Why do people pay me 1,500,000 for rare salvage I bought for 500,000? their time > their play money Why do people pay 500k for a generic IO they could make for 20k? their time > their play money Why do people pay 100,000,000 for an IO they could make for 20,000,000? their time > their play money Why do people pay 100,000 for a piece of common salvage they could get for a few tickets? their time > their play money Until you grasp that underlying reality the market will continue to distress, confuse and anger you. |
No one here would care if you raised the price of nevermelting ice to 5 billion a pop if it only took half a second to raise 5 billion influence. Its probably fun to think that people are too stupid to realize time is meaningful, but I guess most of us just assumed that was so basic a concept that we wouldn't have to go over it. Kind of like not explaining what fire is when you talk about how an internal combustion engine works.
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Originally Posted by StabBot
Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you.
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- "First off, a hundred reasons that you save time for players who are trying to sell and buy things on the market."
- "In conclusion, you're wasting people's time."
Your debate style is highly unorthodox, but I must admit, it's an interesting change of pace! Do you have a newsletter? I'd love to subscribe.
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| No one here would care if you raised the price of nevermelting ice to 5 billion a pop if it only took half a second to raise 5 billion influence. |
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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They can dislike me as much as they like provided they keep stuffing my coffers to the tune of a couple billion a week for my (abhorrent) services.|
Originally Posted by StabBot
Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you.
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=)
Although why anyone would pay me to waste their time is a bit of a mystery. I must be really awesome at mind control!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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If there were some way in which Nethergoat wasted their time, that would make sense.|
Originally Posted by StabBot
Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you.
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In fact, we all understand that people who don't understand even basic economics dislike the marketeers because they don't understand what the marketeers do, and fear what they don't understand.
All your ranting about this ignores the fact that the primary thing marketeers do is save people time. Do you know why I have 300 million loose inf accumulated over twenty minutes of effort on my tanker? Because I saved people time. They could have bought those Obliteration recipes just as cheaply as I could, bought the salvage just as cheaply as I did, and crafted their own enhancements. But that would take time. So they paid me 20M a pop or so to do the work for them, and list finished products so they didn't have to deal with figuring out how many salvage slots they needed open, bidding on stuff, running to a crafting table, and so on.
And here's the great thing: I'm not just saving them time by spending the same amount of time myself. No, I'm saving them time by spending less time.
Time to buy one recipe, all the salvage, and run to a crafting table: Five minutes.
Time to buy 5 recipes, all the salvage, and run to a crafting table: Five minutes and three seconds.
Thanks to me, the total player time spent on those five enhancements is now six minutes instead of twenty-five minutes. And I got paid for helping.
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Of course you are! Your controller has a monopoly on all the purples that are deathlessly important to every casual player's performance!|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Although why anyone would pay me to waste their time is a bit of a mystery. I must be really awesome at mind control! |
Capitalists -- burning's not just for witches anymore!
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Agreed.|
Originally Posted by StabBot
So clearly a broad rule causing all auctions to expire every 72 hours wouldn't be a good thing
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| but I think it's clear that the top end of the marketeering racket needs some serious review. |
When I think something is "clear", I usually like to marshal up some arguments and evidence for it. If I am unable to do so, I take this to mean that it's not actually clear.
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As (IIRC) Fourspeed very elegantly pointed out, Stab's problem appears to be inflation. He's complaining that you can exploit the system by fitting a bajillion alts with non-expiring bids/listings, wait several days/weeks/months, and profit hugely even if your initial estimate was absurd at the time.|
Originally Posted by seebs
If there were some way in which Nethergoat wasted their time, that would make sense.
In fact, we all understand that people who don't understand even basic economics dislike the marketeers because they don't understand what the marketeers do, and fear what they don't understand. |
Or at least, that seems to be his main point of contention. I happen to support the idea of a more thorough transaction history, and frankly I haven't seen one marketeer oppose that idea. If I missed one, then my bad, but there's certainly no monolithic opposition on that one point.
Regardless, it is inflation that drives up prices massively over time. No one flipper can do that, because he has to have the lowest available listing to sell anything. No group of flippers can do it either, because competition among flippers drives high-end prices down. So Stab has all of this misplaced anger stemming from the combo of unlimited list/bid time and the inflation that occurs in any online game where the minting of money is only limited by the collective population's time.
That's why I asked the question in my last post, which I doubt he'll answer. People really don't seem to understand that flippers can't just wave a magic want and inflate prices up to some arbitrarily profitable point. The market has built-in protections against that, protections that will make any such would-be flipper lose his shirt (as Max_Zero will do soon on his Regenerative Tissues, if he needs to free up those market slots in the next two months or so).
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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I'll try one last time though I know it is a waste of my time.|
Originally Posted by StabBot
Until you understand that players don't like you because you waste their time, the forums will continue to confuse you.
No one here would care if you raised the price of nevermelting ice to 5 billion a pop if it only took half a second to raise 5 billion influence. Its probably fun to think that people are too stupid to realize time is meaningful, but I guess most of us just assumed that was so basic a concept that we wouldn't have to go over it. Kind of like not explaining what fire is when you talk about how an internal combustion engine works. |
Flippers waste the time of those who cannot afford to buy it now.
Flippers save the time of those who want to sell it now.
Flippers save the time of those who can afford to buy it now.
They use their slots to save me time and I pay them for that privilege.
They cannot raise the price above what people who are willing to pay will pay. If you think they can then you go do it. We'll wait.
I happen to value my time over that of the whiners who aren't willing to place patient and meaningful bids or willing to pay for the privilege to buy it now. If the game company felt there were more of the whiners they would do something.
What they have done is at merit and alignment merit and ticket stores for the whiners to go shop at.
Prior to those additions for years I told the whiners if you think there are more of you then by all means form your own alternative market. With the addition of gleemail it should be easier than ever.
tl;dr version: Use merits, alignment merits, tickets, gleemail, patience or influence to get what you want. Apart from patience the devs provided the means to obtain the rest to you.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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Wow. That's amazing.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
As (IIRC) Fourspeed very elegantly pointed out, Stab's problem appears to be inflation. He's complaining that you can exploit the system by fitting a bajillion alts with non-expiring bids/listings, wait several days/weeks/months, and profit hugely even if your initial estimate was absurd at the time.
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I am going to go exploit the system, now! I have a five dollar coin, which is actual gold, and currently has a market value of several hundred dollars. Clearly, it is an EXPLOIT and reasonably considered HAX that my great-grandmother saved this.
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| Or at least, that seems to be his main point of contention. I happen to support the idea of a more thorough transaction history, and frankly I haven't seen one marketeer oppose that idea. If I missed one, then my bad, but there's certainly no monolithic opposition on that one point. |
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| Regardless, it is inflation that drives up prices massively over time. No one flipper can do that, because he has to have the lowest available listing to sell anything. No group of flippers can do it either, because competition among flippers drives high-end prices down. So Stab has all of this misplaced anger stemming from the combo of unlimited list/bid time and the inflation that occurs in any online game where the minting of money is only limited by the collective population's time. |
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| That's why I asked the question in my last post, which I doubt he'll answer. People really don't seem to understand that flippers can't just wave a magic want and inflate prices up to some arbitrarily profitable point. The market has built-in protections against that, protections that will make any such would-be flipper lose his shirt (as Max_Zero will do soon on his Regenerative Tissues, if he needs to free up those market slots in the next two months or so). |
But that profit is peanuts compared to what I can make by pricing things to sell and making smaller, but consistent, profits on all my market slots all the time.
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Heh, yeah, or even playing the game normally and selling what's valuable when it drops -- which leads us back to the beginning: Inventory/market space is valuable.
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Originally Posted by seebs
Wow. That's amazing.
I am going to go exploit the system, now! I have a five dollar coin, which is actual gold, and currently has a market value of several hundred dollars. Clearly, it is an EXPLOIT and reasonably considered HAX that my great-grandmother saved this. [snipped for brevity, though reluctantly] And if he doesn't, sure, eventually he can make a profit. But that profit is peanuts compared to what I can make by pricing things to sell and making smaller, but consistent, profits on all my market slots all the time. |
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Something interesting:|
Originally Posted by Obitus
Heh, yeah, which leads us back to the beginning: Inventory/market space is valuable.
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* All the marketeers agree that inventory/market space is valuable.
* Some people, who are not marketeers, claim that it is not.
Which is to say:
* People who are effectively making money on the market think that space is valuable.
* Other people disagree, and complain that they are in some way unable to make money as efficiently as they'd need to in order to buy stuff in the markets.
I hypothesize that this is one of those rare cases in which correlation does suggest the existence of some sort of causal relationship. I propose the theory:
People who understand how the market works well enough to use it effectively recognize the value of inventory/market space, and people who do not recognize that value are unlikely to be able to make as much money on the market as people who do.
Have there been any cases of people who know how the market works claiming that it's full of people who're harming the game's economy?
Thanks for playing, StabBot. You did an excellent job reinforcing the opposing side's arguments, just as you predicted. The players who would be most inclined to whine about inflated prices are precisely the kinds of players who don't want to spend four days selling stuff every time their inventory fills from the natural pace of running missions. Like me, believe it or not.
Any incentive to get those players to put their items on the market increases supply for everyone. Which is good for everyone, because there's very little point in being an evil, dirty, stinkin' rich capitalist pig if there's nothing to spend your ill-gotten gains on.