On the nature of ebil and marketeering

I almost agree. I think that your wording has a bit of a negative connotation - that people who won't pay the prices are too poor to so. I have a billion influence sitting around (not much compared to people here's stocks, I know) and I simply don't want to pay 100k for nevermelting ice.
Flippers sometimes save the time of those who want to sell it now, and even that depends on what "it" is. A stack of white salvage? Sure, that's probably true. A Dam/Recharge Positiron? Not so much.

CoH lets you bid on items that you expect to be posted, so if the markets really did crash and no one put in the effort to sell, but demand stayed the same or at a comparable level, then I think that it would actually be much easier to sell - the irony being that prices on some items probably would be greater than they are now.
This is as subjective as the first, and it assumes that you got your money from marketeering. If you got your money from farming, then it's actually an argument that, unlike everything else so far, we don't have to get so abstractly hypothetical about. Compare the amount of influence gained per hour for a normal player and then compare it to the markup.

You end up with the same situation as selling. The common salvage becomes easier to obtain, the more valuable stuff is probably not. Marking up the price by 20 million isn't necessarily going to be a net gain for quite a few players as opposed to just letting their bid sit overnight (assuming they would be sleeping, eating, or doing something else with their time anyway).

Just because people with no other options will do something doesn't mean it's proof of the merit of the situation which drove them to it.
The solution would be complicated. Implementation of a fix would have unpredictable results. You're like anyone else who's abused any other defect in a game for their benefit. Lemme reiterate that I don't blame you for it, it makes sense to me, but the fact that a fix would be cumbersome and risky shouldn't bely the severity of the problem.
I like the disdain you have for the people whiney enough to use merit and alignment tokens. I think that this shows a critical difference in your perception of how the game should be played and how the average player plays. I'm sure you'll take that as a compliment.
When CoH starts accepting SQL commands, stores databases for me, allows user created forms, etc. then sure. Otherwise, you're being ridiculous.
Yup, and it can be improved upon. They've made improvements over time with AE, merits, and alignment merits, and hopefully they'll continue to roll them out. Have fun abusing the system for the next few years while they slowly try to fix it.

No. Now, there is a cognitive bias here, which is that people who know how the market works are likely using it actively, and people are unlikely to believe themselves to be doing evil, so they have a bias against recognizing such harms, at least in theory.

In practice, though, I think there's enough special cases (e.g., I don't think anyone, even Chaos_Creator, disputes that random salvage disruption is, well, disruptive) that we can reasonably rule that out as a primary explanatory mechanism.

Not entirely. There are groups of people who do "grief" the market by deliberately creating shortages to drive up prices to amuse themselves.

Of course the debate then goes towards are they harming the economy by effectively destroying wealth?

I am of the opinion that there are enough people using the combined markets that effectively no group can really affect the game economy like the banking industry or mortgage industry, etc. can in real life. This is entirely due to the nature of the game creating wealth (inf and drops) out of the air.

This cannot be done in real life but in a game there is no way to have a shortage of natural resources because it just RNGs more.

Unless a flipper is buying nevermelting ice for 100k, then you certainly don't have to pay 100k for nevermelting ice. If he is, then cash in those AE tickets and sell, sell, sell.

Contrarian that I am, I like the history the way it is now.

Given the space limitations of our current system MOAR INFORMATION in the shape of a longer history wouldn't necessarily have the salutary effect people think it would.

Stopping at this point. If flippers aren't getting everything (and I agree they aren't) then they aren't a problem to be solved. They are part of the system.

Someone paid it. So someone doesn't have a problem with it. And as far as where someone gets their inf you seem to have some problem getting that if I play my 50 for 5 years he is going to have a lot of influence. If you are one of those people that call it farming there's no where we can go with any discussions.

If you believe there is a "normal" player to base things against I see no way we can have a real discussion.

I'm being ridiculous? I am abusing the system? Ah the attacks begin where the thinking fails.

Too bad you are completely wrong. Meanwhile I get to enjoy playing the game and you can BMW to your heart's content and the devs won't do what you want. They will point you towards their additons they already added.

I used Nevermelting Ice as an example specifically because it used to cost less than 1k and now routinely goes for over 50k, topping out around what, 110k?

You guys talk a lot about inflation. Maybe I'm sorely mistaken, but do you believe the amount of money in the game has doubled in the past year? Quadrupled? Increased a hundredfold? I would wager that your perception of inflation is sorely inflated, but maybe I'm mistaken.

Obviously the AE issues have exacerbated things, but the notion that they've directly increased the cost of Nevermelting Ice tenfold, much less fiftyfold while providing an incredibly easy way to procure said Nevermelting Ice is a step further than I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.

I think listing the last 100 transactions would decimate the current interface, but if instead of showing the last 5 entries it showed the average of the last 20, the preceding 20, the 20 before that, and then so on, would be nice. I'm not sure how much of an effect it would have, but it would probably be an improvement over what we have now...

That's assuming of course that the database they're running can handle those kinds of record commands at the quantity users would send them... The AH can already be a bit slow now and that'd be a lot more data requested than we see now.

I'll wager--100mil inf

What is the REAL rate of inflation and how do we discover it?

I wasn't thinking of something much longer. I'd rather see:

Last 5 sales took: N minutes/hours/days
24-hour high: X
24-hour low: Y
1-week high: Z
1-week low: W
Last sale: M

This is only one more piece of information, but it's a lot more informative.

So for alchemical silver, you might see:

Last 5 sales took: 2 minutes
24-hour high: 340,000
24-hour low: 60,000
1-week high: 1,200,000
1-week low: 40,000
Last sale: 111,111

and for Kismet +6% accuracy (recipe) [16], you might see:

Last 5 sales took: 9 days
24-hour high: N/A
24-hour low: N/A
1-week high: 3,456,789
1-week low: 1,501,501
Last sale: 1,501,501

That gives you a MUCH better picture, I think. But it's not a huge amount of information.

Just changing it from "last 5" to "last 500", for instance, would be catastrophic for casual players, although I might get some benefit from it. Most people, though, would no longer have any clue how to interact with the information.

What they should do is go to a Lua-based user interface, allowing us to write addons and mods (I hear rumors some other game might have done this), so we can write a Market Helper addon that lets newbies get useful information about the market without having to think too hard.

This is the exact same thing that happened when AE was introduced. Its the exact same thing that happens each new AE exploit....

So whats more likely....? Market Manipulation or AE related?

--Frog

Well lets see!

First I'd buy up all the supply...of course, I'd have to destroy most of it since slots are limited. That'd be pretty doggone pricey, especially as my last foray into arbitrary NMI destruction established that there are several hundred listed for over 5,000,000 inf.

So, I blow a big pile of inf buying up and destroying the stock.
Then I list the survivors at 1,000,000,000, or whatever. Which would cost me an arm and a leg in listing fees.

And then I'd need to place a ton of protective bids to soak up 100% of the incoming supply in order to force people to buy MY stock for one billion inf each. Well, except that all my slots are tied up with insanely expensive listings. Darn it!

Ok, I'll log in an alt and fill up his slots with pricey bids.
But NMIs are very high volume, so I'm spending a ton of inf on stuff I have to delete. And every minute that passes, the crazy prices I'm paying are encouraging people to blow out whatever stocks of NMIs they're sitting on. Why, even my alleged compatriots in TheMarket global are scheming to take advantage of my generosity, charging into the MA building with piles of tickets to set alight on the bonfire of my marketeering vanity!

So, at this point what have I accomplished?
I've dropped a crapton of inf setting things up, I'm spending a crapton of inf buying up supply, I've ignited a mad selling frenzy among the high information players who keep track of the market....and I have yet to sell a single one of my wildly overpriced NMIs, which are hanging from my market slots like monetary albatrosses.


But hey no worries, I'm sure my awesome mind control powers will kick in soon and I'll end up making a whole boat-ton of inf!

So it's gone from immeasurably small to immeasurably small?

Neverselling Ice is only useful to high-level characters -- who are generating inf so fast that this difference is statistically lost in the noise. All that has to happen to make something like this happen is an AE exploit resulting in a lot of rich players who are not generating any common salvage, but who are making it into the 40s and 50s quickly and then want a bunch of IOs.

Demand goes up, supply doesn't, that's gonna create a big shift in prices.

You're conflating two different things. One is the general inflation in the game, which you'd observe by watching things like, say, prices of PvP IOs. (This is confounded by the A-merit system, which lowers the prices of regular rare recipes and procs, while raising the prices of purples and PvP IOs.) The other is changes in salvage consumption and availability, such as we get from AE farms.

Okay, I have to say, I respect you, because the fact that you'd say this tells us you've never grouped with AE farmers. I have -- I was impatient and didn't feel like levelling through the doldrums. You know what? I was, I think, the only person on that team who had ever actually seen a punctuation mark. They were vaguely aware that "rare salvage" was the "best way to get money lol". So they spent ALL their tickets on rare salvage. They didn't even consider recipes. I'm not even sure they knew what recipes were. Heck, I don't just mean City of Heroes. I'm not sure they knew the word "recipe". I suspect that if you'd asked them how to prepare lunch, their answer would have involved asking an adult to go to McDonald's and bring them three value meals.

So, first off, you're making a grave mistake if you think that the people doing the AE farming are, for the most part, capable of the kind of reasoning involved in figuring out how to most efficiently use their tickets to save money.

There's another issue. See, it turns out, it's still not worth the hassle.

So I have this toon, who has ~7k tickets. I am well aware that the best use of tickets in terms of inf/ticket is random rolls of common arcane salvage, 25-40. Do you think I actually rolled on salvage I wanted? Oh, of course I did! Once. I filled up an inventory with things most of which were useless to me, making my shortage of WW slots even worse, and out of the 30 salvage rolls, I got I think five things I might have wanted. It took several minutes, I had to run up to AE and back, and the net result is that I got salvage which I could have bought immediately for 100k, or very quickly for 5k.

So while I was trying to roll arcane salvage in the hopes of getting luck charms (I got one of the four I needed), I also left lowball bids of 1,234 inf on stacks of things that were running for 50-100k.

Guess what! I got the items I placed lowball bids on faster than I got the items I tried to roll for.

In short, while in theory rolling on common salvage is a great way to save money, in practice, it's not worth the time it would take to save enough money to matter. In a fraction of the time I'd spend rolling on salvage to use up 7k tickets, I could have done a handful of silver rolls and gotten stuff that would market for enough to buy me all the common salvage that character will buy in the next ten levels.

If more than one says something other than "wat?" or "lol" or emits a random racial or sexual slur, you have found an unusually good team.

... Okay, I'm exaggerating very slightly.

No offense, but I can't help noticing that you didn't answer the question. You just hand-waved all external forces on the bald assumption that a massive AE leveling exploit wouldn't have as much effect as flipping would to inflate prices. AE leveling exploits spike the supply of rare salvage at the expense of non-rare salvage, because it's easier to spend that many tickets on bigger-ticket items, which is because -- you guessed it -- inventory/market storage is valuable.

Why do you suppose purples are now hovering in the 400 million range? Do you really think that that's because of Flippers? It couldn't be that people aren't playing regular content right now -- and thus are disqualifying themselves from those drops -- could it?

Yeah, inflation has had a huge effect over time. You gotta understand that inflation in an environment like this one (even ignoring the occasional, massive mechanical change to the rewards schemes that move the playerbase) snowballs like population growth. The more inf you have, the more people are IOing their builds to the nines to farm stuff (which was always a popular activity, even dating back to Issue 1), the more influence people produce per unit time. The enhanced difficulty slider also represented a massive boost to population's farming capacity.

But hey, let's hand-wave all of the above. Let me ask you again -- how exactly does Nethergoat force prices up so high and sustain it? Do you understand how bids are filled?

Nevermind. Nethergoat answered the question admirably. I suggest you read his little scenario to understand why outright manipulation on a large scale doesn't work -- or at least doesn't work to the manipulator's benefit when all is said and done.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

here are some facts to mull over.

Nobody wastes MA tickets on common or uncommon salvage, so MA's contribution of common and uncommon salvage to the market is effectively zero. Meanwhile, any glut of MA tickets generates a massive flood of IO recipes and rare salvage.

NMIs are high level salvage.
High level farmers all flock to MA whenever there's an 'exploit' that's delivering a tremendous payoff.
So the go from making a crapton of inf and generating a crapton of commons to generating a METRIC crapton of inf and NO common salvage.

The current price point of NMIs isn't a surprise...what's surprising is that it's not HIGHER.

you forgot


"reset?"

Yes. Usually in response to unrelated events.

/team Oh, man. My sis-in-law just called, my nephew's in the hopsital.
[Team] pw109wnzz11: reset?

Then don't. Bid what you do want to pay and wait.

Imagine, if you will, that you're willing to pay 10k, but not 100k, but some allegedly-evil guy is buying all the ice there is for 9k, and listing it at 100k.

Fine. Bid 9,001, and your bid fills before his. Problem solved. The only way the alleged "flipper" can make it impossible for you to buy under 100k is if that's his bidding price. And if he's bidding what the stuff sells for, he's losing money, so there's no problem with people who are trying to make money on the market screwing you.

Even then, I think there's a tendency for them to even out supply so there's more likely to be one available at some price, but that price may be higher. I may be saving time for someone who desperately wants a dam/rech positron, and is willing to pay a lot for it, while costing time for someone who doesn't want it enough to bid as much as I'd bid on it, so my bid fills first. But the second guy has already decided that he's bidding low and waiting, so... no worries. He's not the one who cares about his time, he's the one who cares about his money.

The problem is that you've yet to establish that the market is not doing what the developers intend it to do, or that the people you claim are "abusing" the "defect" are doing anything of the sort.

You haven't shown that there is a defect.
You haven't shown that what the marketeers do is "abuse".
You haven't shown that what the marketeers do is even a minor contributor to the state of affairs you dislike.

You have not ruled out the following possibilities:
1. The market is doing what the developers want.
2. The market is doing something that follows naturally from AE exploits.

The second is my pick, just because previous AE exploits have produced exactly the same pattern of unaffordable common salvage, and there's a clear mechanism for it -- lots of people who suddenly have 10x as much inf as they used to, and 0x as much salvage as they used to, and who are generating nothing but rare salvage.

I like the way you completely misunderstand and misread peoples' posts, then insult them over it. No, wait, not like. Dislike.

Merits and a-merits are a solution the devs provided to the alleged problems with the market. The reality is, some players have whined, not merely complained, about the market. Some of those complaints were loud, some of them were well-founded, and heck, some were probably both. The developers responded by changing things so that people who ran a lot of TFs or alignment tip missions could get exactly the recipes they wanted instead of relying on random drops plus marketeering.

Now, here's the key thing: The developers set the rate at which you can earn recipes through those mechanisms. What that tells us is that, by definition, the rate at which you can get things through those mechanisms is the rate the devs intend you to be able to get things. If you do not think you can earn things fast enough by those mechanisms, your problem is not with other players, but with the devs.

You're being a real jerk here. Seriously. You're accusing people of "abusing" something. That's accusing them of breaking the game rules, because griefing and abusing are against the rules.

And yet, you haven't shown that any of the behaviors marketeers engage in are actually "abuse". To do that, you have to find some kind of evidence or support for the theory that the ability to do these things is unintended, or they're using them wrong.

Furthermore: The grand total of my "flipping" was that once I sold a bunch of brass for 250k and bought a bunch for 500 inf on a lowbie toon. It took weeks. It was not especially rewarding. The reason I have two billion inf lying around now is that I craft recipes. Constantly. Across 20 toons. I am selling people things that save them time. Lots of time.

And you're accusing me of "abusing" the system. I'm doing exactly what people say we ought to be doing -- making money exclusively and only by adding value. Heck, sometimes I lose money by adding value, because I craft every recipe I get except temporary powers. I get a level 25 intangibility recipe, which will cost 300k in AE-inflated common salvage to make, and sell for 30 inf? I craft it anyway. I am providing the supply of pre-crafted enhancements that people who are rich and in a hurry want.

And here I am, burning my time and auction slots to make things easier for people -- and since I only buy recipes at substantially under the usual going rate, people who want to craft a recipe themselves can nearly always buy one just by bidding a reasonable amount for it -- and you're calling me names and accusing me of "abusing" the system.

What is your problem here? Why is it so important to you to condemn actions that you've made it quite clear you don't understand? Why is it so hard for you to admit the blatant, clear, reality that AE farming exploits inflate common salvage by orders of magnitude, every single time they happen? It's not as if there's any lack of evidence tying AE farms to common salvage prices. It's not as if the mechanism is secret. You can go ahead and ask people on AE farms how they're making money, and they'll tell you -- they're getting rares and selling them for 1M a pop, because that's a ton faster than trying to get hundreds of common salvage and sell them.

Seriously: Calling people "abusers" is not okay. That is not how adult society works among civilized people. If you wanna go around namecalling whenever you don't like something, try junior high or something. Here, how about you stick to factual claims that you're willing to back with evidence, and leave the namecalling out?

What in blue blazes are you nattering on about??? Nice obfuscation to
completely miss the point...

There's no 100 million barrels of oil involved, and no hazmat materials
storage, and the sale would no more affect the oil business than the
sale of your long storage items altered the market.

If, in 1975, you filled up a 100 gallon tank for .50/gallon (we had 250 gal
tank on the farm iirc, so this isn't all that unusual or difficult), and then
tried to sell (ie. flip, in game terms) that gas for $2.50/gallon, it would
have been sitting there a very long time (until somewhere around 2004 or
so, based on this chart).

At that point, you'd have gotten your price -- through natural inflation...

If this simple example is confusing you, or seems "critically different" than
what you did with your market items, I'm pretty sure I've determined the
real issue - you have little understanding of the workings of the market.

So, that pretty much concludes our discussion on that topic.


As for inflation, you can probably estimate the money supply (very loosely,
within an order of magnitude - Millions vs Billions vs Trillions, etc.), with
some simple math for those so-inclined to use a pen, napkin and 5 minutes
of time.

They've said they have ~100,000 players per month... We also know that
high level guys are producing the supply (look at relative item volumes by
level), and we further know that L50's can make anywhere from 1M/hr to
20M/hr depending on what they're running.

So, let's say, for giggles, 10% of those 100K players run L50s for 10 hrs/wk
(so, a couple tfs worth), at 5M/hr...

So, that's 10000 L50's * 10 hrs * 5M/hr == 500,000,000,000 inf / week
or ~2 Trillion inf / month...

First, that's a pretty conservative estimate (I'd suspect) on L50 activity -
the game is 6 years old...

Second, that further ignores *any* contribution at all by the other 90,000
L1-L49 players.

Third, that doesn't even consider inf from vendored drops.

So, loosely speaking we're probably talking somewhere around 3 Trillion?
(speculating on those factors) of new influence being generated *every*
month out of thin air through normal gameplay...

The only real sinks to that are: The Market (in the 10% fees), Costumes,
and other Stores, and S/VG prestige (assuming they converted inf for it as
the 88'rs do)...

If there's a surprise about inflation, it's that it isn't worse than we currently see.

I suspect it's largely because many players have massive piles of inf that
they're really unable to spend, so it stays (largely) uncirculated, but that is purely speculation on my part.

In short, the devs might wanna give some thought to some money sinks or
the inf cap... assuming they've actually done the real math, or care much
about the results.


Regards,
4

You have a much stronger negative connotation of that word than I do. To me it's simply when you see something isn't working the way it was intended, and you exploit it in a way that is detrimental to other players.

Because exploit has a strong negative connotation, lemme be clear on which denotation I'm using: I don't know you. I am accusing the average marketeer of skimming money off the top of players transactions without providing meaningful value to the system. You are well aware your habits are atypical.

I already do that. The problem when supply is tight, a history of 5 is not sufficient to gauge what value they're being bought out at. You might have to wait 30 minutes to see the string of lowball bids snatch them up. If the purpose of this game is the AH metagame to you, then I'm sure that seems fine. If you log on to go fire off ridiculous powers in a silly costume at polygonal bad guys, then it's tedious and it's just a speed bump.
You acknowledge the devs set the intended rate at which you are intended to acquire those items.
therefore number one is disproven. Marketeering far exceeds the speed at which the devs intend for players to acquire items.

Personally I think the market was intended to be a system which reduces the effects of randomness by facilitating trade. Instead, whenever players trade items a third party drains a significant portion of the worth from both. Not that I expect people to care or change. I just find the assertion that the average marketeer who does nothing but markup items is adding value ridiculous.

Funny, the LotG 7.5% enhancements I buy seem to be worth 7.5% recharge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

You really, really need a new dictionary, dude.
Try using the one everybody else has, you'll get better results.

Also, the market is working precisely, exactly as intended.

The malfunction is on your end.

Okay, let's look at those two claims:

1. Isn't working the way it was intended: You have not supported this claim. Given the number of things the developers have done to tweak recipe acquisition, it seems clear that they are definitely looking at the process by which players acquire enhancements, and do not think the market part of it is broken. Thus, it is working the way it was intended.
2. A way that is detrimental to other characters: You have not supported this claim. Since the key thing you've pointed at (common salvage costs) is clearly massively affected by AE exploits, and is not something that marketeers would bother with, since the amounts of money involved aren't big enough to make a significant profit, it seems pretty unlikely that marketeers are having a significant effect.

And yet, you have not demonstrated this to be the case, at all. Every marketeer I know crafts things. Furthermore, we've seen several examples of how, in the real world, "market makers" and speculators provide huge value to the system, by making the market more efficient.

Which is why I don't waste time on it.

And yet, the devs have repeatedly made it more effective, by working on improving the market interface, without any attempt to change this. Why? Because it is working as intended; people who keep the market liquid and flexible are getting rewarded for doing something otherwise tedious instead of going out and punching dudes.

I agree.

This is not generally true. It may be that it is true in some cases, but it is not generally the case; in most cases, I suspect that the items I sell are going to people who want to use them, and the items I buy are absolutely items I am planning to use. Even among marketeers, this seems to be pretty common.

Since people have explained what else the marketeer is doing, and how it adds value, and have shown you multiple real-world examples in everything from stock markets to futures markets, that you continue to find it "ridiculous" reflects on you, not on the well-documented observed reality.

In the real world, market makers make markets more efficient, and everyone else in the market benefits. This may be counter-intuitive; it is nonetheless true.