So I gave it a Whirl

Hi all, I've been on many threads concerning the expense of certain salvage and recipes.

Now I gave 3 days of my time seeing what effect I could have on certain piece of salvage (Temporal Tracers) and how much profit I could make out of it.

This is how it went:-

Day 1 saw 1053 pieces for sale, 35 bidders and the current price for these was 1k. I then proceeded to buy up these with 10 alts and relist them for 250k.

Day 2 saw 675 pieces, 186 bidders with current selling price of 300k. I still had 4 alts worth left of salvage.

Day 3 saw 800 pieces for sale, 345 bidders with a current selling price 300k-500k 0 salvage left.

Final accumlation saw that I had pocketed over 2bn in 3 days, and that I had risen that salvage from a comfortable 1k to anywhere from 300k-500k.

Now I am heavily in pocket (yay me) but I failed to see how I benefited the market.

Is this the way to work the market or did I do a no-no?

It is one way and in the short term it works. But try doing it long term and as far as we've ever seen you will lose money.

I find your results interesting.

It would be interesting (and immensely time consuming) to see how much of the Salvage moved that you didn't ever touch.

Similarly, I bet over a period not-much-greater-than 3 days, you'd have people (some people) resort to using Tickets to getting some, thus eventually limiting your income.

Still.

Billions in several days, and not experiencing losses? ...interesting results.

Oh I missed off one thing I did as well.

With 5 extra alts I placed bids from 1k to 50k purchasing people dumping salvage.

Out of these 90 transaction slots each attempting 10 purchases, I only managed to purchase 234 pieces of salvage,

I would be vastly interested in seeing this experiment again, but with a little more thought put into proposal and documentation....not calling anyone a liar or anything even remotely close to that....but others will.

A few screen shots, a better presentation format, and a better description of methodology would go a long way.....

Thanks for the information

--Frog

Hehe, I didn't think of screenshots was done without much thought into it at first. It got more interesting for me well in to Day 2 and by then far to late to start screenshots as such.

lol I wasn't about to start all over again, as it was quite time consuming and boring for most parts.

I just wish they didn't have the 30 second timer to switch chars, would have made life a lot easier.

Why did you think your actions would benefit the market? You benefited your personal finances, which should have been the goal anyway.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slazenger Is this the way to work the market or did I do a no-no?

You absolutely did a no-no. You made two billion inf, but failed to include a pic of yourself with a top hat, monocle, and /teabag emote. For shame!

It should be noted that the notoriously impatient market is behaving even more so as of late, presumably from i19 making respecs beneficial for virtually every alt in the game. Not saying this diminishes your accomplishment in the here and now but I suspect the results would be a tad more limited before the issue's release and after the respecs have completed.

I think this particular item is a good example of some strong instability in the market. When I say "instability", I don't mean the market is going to collapse, or something negative. I mean that conditions come about that are highly sensitive to abrupt and strong change.

The supply of this salvage is pretty high. It took what sounds like a lot of effort for one person to manage draining it so that the price could be manipulated. After all, we have mention of the 30-second timer on logging out being a hassle during the exercise. In general, that supply currently seems to exceed demand, enough that listed supply tends to build up. When this started there were over 1000 for sale. There's nothing quite equivalent to Field Crafter that naturally causes people to consume large amounts of any given Uncommon salvage, so the shift of people running level 50 content seems a likely culprit for general depression of most all high-level commons and uncommons.

However, we just recently went through a period of immense price rise fueled by an AE exploit. I suspect that inf production rates are still high, due, if nothing else, to more people playing 50s more than before to wrap up their uncommon Alpha slots. Increased supply is depressing prices, but lots of currency is still available to throw at goods who's supply dries up, and there is still probably a bit of desensitization to high prices after the AE exploit. Yank the supply on something currently under-supplied and the prices quickly shoot back to levels comparable to the end of I18.

So this is basically a good time to conduct this sort of experiment. Kudos on finding a suitable target and not losing your shirt. It may be a bit easier to pull off than at many times in the past, but it still was a seeming success that's not guaranteed to work.

If you did the market any good, it would have been in terms of the total transaction rate of Temporal Tracers. The low price and high supply may have dissuaded people who wouldn't sell everything anyway from bothering to list their Tracers. At 300k a pop, anyone who saw that would probably be willing to get in on that action, and this more have been listed for sale per day, especially during days two and three. However, I don't know of a way we could show this actually happened.

Or instead of trying to say "how unusual you accomplished such a successful profiteering experience, there must be something unusual going on in the market" ...

You could always just acknowledge how effectively he manipulated the market. Comfortably demonstrated that marketeers can make substantial profits by manipulating supply and listing prices. And to boot did it in a higher volatility item.

I still find it amusing why so many forumites here "pretend" like market manipulation isn't viable, and doesn't affect the market. Well either pretend or simply don't understand how to make it work well ? We wont get into the discussion about all the poor saps who had to pay a 300% markup for their salvage pieces and probably cried foul for the 3 days, lol.

This "in game" market is a "closed" system. It doesn't have the same variables you would encounter in a real world system. It very effectively manipulated for gain by so many of us. Why is there the constant "denial" about it ?

Again, incredibly amusing.

Er, MNV: It's higher-volatility items where it's easiest to nudge things. Smaller overall market = more room to influence that market. Uncommons aren't used for common IOs, so many people don't need them, but they can be components in stuff where the next item over in your shopping list costs four or five million inf, so no one cares much what they cost.

No one disputes that, in theory, if you want to put in the time, you can do stuff like this for at least a while. It may, in some cases, be profitable at least in the short term. In the long term, though, people will come along, notice that temporal tracers are hugely profitable and easy to buy from AE, and probably start taking advantage of them.

When you jump into the market for something that usually vendors for more than it sells for at WW, if there's not that many up, there's plenty of room for short-term effects. It's not practical to sustain them, though, so far as we know... And that's where the accusations that people are manipulating the prices of, say, Alchemical Silver, come into play. Short-term, sure. Long-term, maybe not.

Exactly. When I decide to bid on something, I usually try a couple of lowballs. I regularly see things with last-five all 500k where a bid at 12,345 gets me at least one item, possibly more than one. If more people did this, prices would be less sticky.

Personally if I were to try this sort of thing again; I would hit a recipe rather than salvage.
I might need more Inf to do it, but I wouldn't require alting so much and that was the hassle for me on that trial.

When I finally get around to doing it, I will remember to take screenie's next time
What I will aim for is a Recipe ( Gaussian or something that requires all recipes to get best out bonuses) with high enough supply to it and a low supply of same recipe crafted (hopefully under 10, so I can use 1 alt).
Will then buy up all crafted and un-crafted and see how I go.

Good point, I never considered that, hmm If I was to try it again would have to be salvage then.

I don't even want to go near inspirations lol

I too agree that recipes are the way to go. It seems to me a tiny fraction of people bother shopping anywhere but at the top and bottom of the level range for items. There used to be some other critical levels, like level 33 for Siren's Call builds, but that seems to have dried up since I13.

Edit: The above recommendation was from the perspective of optimal profits. However, in terms of academic interest, you might try a common high-level common arcane. Personally, I have long been confused by the trend in common high-level arcane salvage. For a long time after Family and Freak farms were nerfed, common high-level arcane salvage was cheap on hero side, and high-level tech salvage was cheap villain side. I always attributed this to the farming of Demons on hero side and Nemesis on villain side. However, for some time before the market merge, and definitely after, it's tech salvage that is vastly oversupplied on the merged market, and supply of arcane salvage appears fragile. This surprises me, with the presumption of people playing level 50 content. It's not as simple as Praetoreans just dropping tech, either. (As far as I know, they don't. I got an arcane rare from a War Works bot on one of the new TFs.)