How you would balance the Market?

So they can flip out and kill people!

[edit: needed an exclamation point!]

You have access to the same tools of logic, reason, and rhetoric that I do. You cannot be shouted down with volume. You cannot be arbitrarily silenced by another player. I didn't get "mod's pet" status when I hit 10,000 posts. You cannot be bullied or intimidated unless you let yourself be.

We have the same tools, you and I. (Or you and Yomo, all_hell, Nethergoat, whomever.) If you get "shot down" it might be because your ideas weren't very bulletproof.

Thats how i make my billions. I sell. I don't try to flip, find niches or anything else via market. When i log in, i log in to play toons. Not sit at WW. Theres a toon on Justice, everytime i log in its sitting in WW. I go run several farms, play with the base editor or whatever. When i get ready to log off, hes still in WW. I mean hours per day. Not the 5 minutes people claim to use it.

But it is getting to the point to where im keeping way more recipes than selling now days just to avoid even going to WW due to the prices inflating at rates higher than medical ins, gas, and duke powers energy bills. If the supply/demand is so off that prices jump 10s millions per month, somethings wrong. But i guess that don't matter for those that have 1 toon IOd with yellows that sit in WW for hours thru the day.

I disagree with getting more drops/xp running missions. For one, i sit for myself. Im not sitting for someone else to PL MEH. If im on a team of 8, my xp is less than a team of 2, and i can't level (with PUG teams) faster than i can level myself.

And i don't purple EVERY toon. And i dont use PvP at all. (i dont bother pvping) I couldn't afford to at todays prices. But i do use the higher tier IOs. That alone, still can't be done with just playing to 50. Cheap IOs maybe, but not all the procs, and high end IOs. Without alot of marketeering and i could care less about that part of the game. What i don't like is WW is the only fast way to get IOs and that is based on other peoples moral values, which is very low it seems.

Thats by letting us buy it thru a store type and not based on other peoples values of what they think its valued. People can only bid/buy to the sellers prices. Yes, bid creeping helps but you still have to climb til you get to where it was posted. Ex. I tried to pay the going price on an IO the other day. Only 1 was for sale, 0 bidding. I place the going rate. Hmm, no sale. So i bid higher. No sale. I almost had to double the last 5 to get it. WHY? Because someone wasn't happy with the last 5 sold and wanted more. To get it, i had to pay it because there wasn't any more.... Greed goes to the seller....

Edit mine.

Had to? No you didn't. Had you waited, you would've got it for the "going rate", but because you "had" to have it right now, you had to pay more.

Every time I post something like "It costs me 50 million to buy a recipe and 10 million to buy the salvage, that's like 150 million just for one IO!" I get twenty people jumping all over me saying horrible mean things like "Um, 50 + 10 = 150? Really?" or "You might want to check your math there" or "here, you can borrow my calculator". CLEARLY THE MARKET FORUMS ARE GANGING UP ON ME.

Couple things here.

1. Not everyone likes or can do task forces which is the only major supply of merits
2. not all recipes are for sale with a-merits though most are
3. trying to get a single purple set (6 items) with amerits through just missions would take over half a year of real world time. The time to outfit a toon with just amerits, even without purples is insanely long in a game.

These things need to be taken into account when talking about the market. It's not as simple as "I'll just go spend 400 merits" or whatever.

I know the guy you're talking about. As in, I know him personally.

He doesn't really play CoH any more. Not in PvE. He occasionally goes on a TF, and lately he has been leveling up a new Scrapper. Mostly, though, because PvE doesn't excite him, PvP was screwed, and because he's pretty busy in Real Life, he uses it as a fancy 3D IRC client. He is AFK a lot of the time. He logs in and out at the market and leaves characters standing there all the time because he's not really playing, but when he does play, he likes to be richly IO'd, so he does do stuff on the market.

He's just not a good example, because he's not playing like most people at all.

That is hyperbole, because it suggests that everything on the market has done that. It hasn't. Some things became much less expensive, and some things became a lot more expensive, but the market as a whole has not clearly inflated to that degree.

What's a prime example? LotG +Recharge globals. For a while before we got Alignment Merits, and while lots of people were AE farming the most recent major exploit, crafted level 25 LotGs were selling consistently for 250M inf, and I sold a couple for 300M. Now I've been lucky if I can sell one for 200M inf, and that's during double XP weekend. Most of the time they're more like 150M inf. That's 60% what I used to be able to sell it for, and if I try to price it at the old value, it won't move.

Purples got more expensive because, in part, the price on things like LotGs, Miracles and other "Pool C" stuff dropped due to increased supply, but the supply of purples didn't change much. A-Merits are accessible by more of the player base than large numbers of Reward Merits, so they tended to create a bulk supply increase, but because the A-Merit rate on purples is so high, that hasn't happened for them. It's cheaper to buy them with money on the market.

I do, at least when the build calls for it. (I don't blindly add purples, but I do like lots of +recharge on most builds.) Like you, I don't flip or especially marketeer. Unlike you, I don't farm to speak of, but I do produce a lot of merits (mostly Reward, but also Alignment), and I use them to buy high-priced items, either to use or to sell for money which I use to buy purples.

What's low moral value about the way I use WW, exactly? I don't use it to "screw" anyone. I don't flip. I don't vacuum away supply to cause price surges. (I don't consider those screwing people, really, but I am inferring that you do.) Yet I have heavily purpled characters and about 10 billion in liquid. (I didn't add it up, but I have 1-2B across 7 50s and a few more 500M characters in the 30s.) What morals did I discard if I did that just playing the game? If I did that, why can't you?

Like it or not, this is a core aspect of the game. When it comes to leveling up and, honestly, most regular content, I'm a pretty hard-core soloer. I do, however, attend lots of TFs.

While I have some sympathy for it, saying you don't like to or can't go on TFs in this game is tantamount to saying "I don't like to or can't really play this game," at least in a way that will produce IOs. TF's are basically this game's core reward mechanic with respect to IOs. A-Merits put a serious dent in that, as indicated by the price drops I mentioned, but if you're hard-core about running them, you can earn more Reward Merit equivalence in a day than you can Alignment Merits (barring buying them). I don't claim many people are that hard-core, but I'm just pointing out a reason I consider Reward Merits still the prime reward mechanism.

If you both can't/won't TF and you don't want to use the market, even just to sell A-Merit bought LotGs or Miracles or BotZ or something, well, I'm sorry, but you've cut out too many of the key paths to success. I don't think the devs should be beholden to "fix" the economy to account for people who can't or won't do those things, because I think people that cant' or won't do either are a small minority.

Genuine curiosity here: what recipes aren't?

There's a message in here. I think the devs never intended anyone to do that. Merits are a pressure valve only for the most expensive items. Spending them any other way is wasteful. If you can spend 2 A-Merits or 200 R-Merits on something that costs 150M on the market, why would you spend 125 R-Merits or 1 A-Merit on something that costs 25M? The devs expected people to mix and match.

The devs expect people to use the market. Just as I believe Task Forces are the main IO-generating reward path (now heavily supplemented by A-Merits), I believe that the market is the main path to IO acquisition by design. When most stuff is generated by random drops, you need a market to transfer that stuff from those who got it but didn't want to to those who didn't get it but want it. It's totally fair to talk about whether people like using the market, or whether the market could be more friendly or efficient, but it's not reasonable to talk about removing some sort of market from the equation without deeply revamping the reward system in CoH - and again, that reward system is meant to be a time sink.

You were greedy for your IO and your time. You got your time and your IO. You traded inf for those two things. Otherwise you could have waited and gotten a different price or bought something else if you hadn't been so greedy for your time and your IO.

How much inf is 'insanely long' time worth?
Time is still the ultimate commodity. This is the amount of time the Devs have decided that ultra rares are worth. If it's too much time in a player's opinion, the player is free to do something else with their time and/or choose another enhancement.

Secondly, Playing the game for six months isn't exactly a horrible thing. I have been playing for years myself.

I think that these things are taken into account when people decide how mush they are willing to pay for various items.

Morality? Really? You're playing that card? Do you pull that card out when you play Monopoly too?

Like the Merit vendors the Devs have already given us?

Most uncommons are not for sale with A-merits, but those are cheap with regular reward merits if you want em.

it really is too bad brilliant ideas like price caps and vendors that sell stuff at what the poster thinks is a fair price get shot down over and over, isn't it.

Oh well, at least the market does what the devs intended it to do, even if it fails to fulfill the Utopian visions of resident socialists and moralizers.

The main difference is that prices would be set by supply and demand instead of the system we have now which is based instead on how much people are willing to pay for things and how available they are. See below

So, let me get this straight- you'd prefer prices be determined by supply and demand, rather than by supply and demand?


An interesting distinction!

No, I am just quoting someone. I want just the opposite. I think that prices should be determined by demand and supply, like in Soviet Russia.

The main difference would be that we would have eliminated human greed from the equation. Prices would be set based on our lust for power instead of on our greed.

I'm not seeing any meaningful differentiation there.

I think you flipped a "not" in there somewhere. Or else 2XP has more deeply confused me than I realized.

You are correct. Actually I just messed up that sentence entirely. I'll go fix0r it.