How you would balance the Market?

Welcome to 2008? I've known since at least then (probably before) that if you want to farm for inventions you do it as solo as possible. At worst you do it with a group of close friends, because I'm nearly as happy one of them got a purple as if I got it.

At one point I had an observation that I'd seen enough to believe was probably true, but hadn't done any statistics on: the lowest level on the team gets VASTLY more recipe drops than the highest level. So if you did those farms with lowbies getting phat XP... they were also getting all your phat drops.


In other news: the reason prices are going up is there aren't enough money sinks in game. Inf in > inf out = Inf total rising = prices rise.

Who knew?

Too bad it is close to impossible to fix. Slap on huge market fees to sink the money and you'll just kill the market. Remember the original hammie-O days where it was a barter-only economy? I do. It sucked. Hardcore. I still could trade my way to riches by smart bartering 2-for-3s, but still.

I'm not even clear that you could lower recipe costs by increasing the drop rate of recipes. The problem is the amount of inf in the game, not the rarity of the recipes. If you made recipes more available, you'd get more people looking at IOing their builds out which will counteract any temporary price drop you'd see from it being more common. Also you'd just waste more time deleting the vast majority of recipes (ie: useless ones) while trying to play.

Put another way: in order for higher recipe drop rates to lower prices, they'd need to suck inf from the system in the form of auction fees. Otherwise the market will probably be 'faster' -- you'll see a lot more things trading hands -- but not strictly cheaper. That will help suck inf from the system, so it might work, but it'd have to be pulling inf out at the relatively low AH fees faster than inf enters the system from killing baddies.

I'm pretty sure he only wants them to increase the drop rate on recipes "people actually use," ie recipes he wants to use but can't afford. After all, nobody uses all those other garbage recipes.

Also, let's not forget a very important thing here - for what I expect are a significant majority of players, having more wealth is a means to an end - that wealth is used to obtain more power for their characters. Even people who hoard wealth typically do so for "rainy day" purposes, to ensure they have ready access to new market items when they become available.

So for many people, "greed" for wealth is about "greed" for power.

It should work. You don't create significant demand by increasing supply. Sure, there would be a segment of people who don't even bother today who could be encouraged to participate if supply drives down prices enough, but I don't think that's likely to be a major part of the economy. When you increase supply without increasing demand (significantly), prices should decline. The only reasons they wouldn't should be (a) that supply actually increased significantly, probably due to other forces, (b) supply of money increased enough to swamp the price decrease or (c) money moved from some other part of the economy to the segment you just increased supply for, possibly because people stopped buying something else, or because supply of other things increased even more, driving their price down even more.

I just ran a bunch of that Roman dude's repeatable missions and got an Absolute Amazement: Stun. Oh look, good stuff does drop after all.

This is true for liquid markets, where trades happen often enough to create at least some semblance of dynamic equilibrium. In thin markets, and a lot of high demand items create essentially very thin individual markets, all bets are off, because adding supply won't just increase the supply side of that market, it will fundamentally change that market. We don't know, for example, just how much demand for certain items never makes it to the markets due to the belief its pointless. Conversely, we don't know what will happen when people who used to make more influence for those items decide to change their activities when it becomes less profitable, creating a negative feedback in supply. Those are minor factors in liquid markets, but not in thin ones.

I can't disagree, but I did base my position on my experience with other players. There are, without question, those who believe they can never obtain certain things, and therefore don't even try. If cost was the only factor involved, that could easily be a large number of players relative to the current market participation. However, I generally find that those players conflate such "price malaise" with other broad factors. Common examples include: general dislike of the market (irrespective of what stuff there actually costs); and general unwillingness to learn about sets, set bonuses, etc. and the power mechanics around them.

This is, I believe, something of a personality thing - those who are willing to learn about powers and IOs an all that seem, in general, more willing to learn how to use the market, and even to use the market when they dislike doing so, because they tend towards Achiever and/or Killer personalities. Players disinterested in learning how IOs work aren't going to flock to buying them because they become cheaper. The real change will be in people who are "on the fence" in either category - Achiever/Killer types who don't have the drive or so dislike the market that they don't already seek the most expensive IOs, or other types who have just enough Achiever/Killer in them that making IOs cheaper would remove their main barrier to entry.

Obviously, I can't know how many people in the CoH space fit into that middle ground, but in my completely subjective experience, it's not that many of them. Enough to counteract any given supply increase? We'll probably never know, even if the devs were to bump up supply, because it's so rare that only one thing like that changes at a time.

Since the start of December I've gotten 9 purples. 3 were awesome, 2 were decent, and 4 kind of sucked. Apparently, I've been stealing all of eryq's drops.

Or one reversible belt, greedhead!

Quoted because many, many people overlook this point. I would also like to mention that I can't remember anyone complaining about the price of a LoTG +Recharge lately. That was an absolute STAPLE of the pre-AMerit groanfests. You have access to the best builds that anyone could make before purples were introduced, easily and cheaply, and nobody talks about them any more.

In order for supply to increase, those who participate in the market must list more. If I list more, then I get more inf, even were it at a lower price. If I get more inf, I want to spend it on shiny things. Maybe a second build. Or third. Or purples. Or even set IOs on an alt I hadn't bothered with them on yet. If I spend it on shiny things, I've raised demand for said things (set IOs in the general sense).

Like I said, I'm not convinced that prices should drop. The econ101 supply and demand curves thing makes a lot of assumptions about the size of the market and an individual's effect on it that just aren't true in a MMO. Like, for instance, it ignores that to increase supply enriches at a much higher rate than the factory wage model, the same people who are demanding.


Also: if things dropped a bit easier, you might get some of the "its too expensive" whiners hooked in because they have 4/5ths of a set they want and actually totter over to the market to buy the last piece.

If you list more and everyone else is listing more, the price will drop, because you have to compete with one another. Someone will list lower than you, and someone will bid above that and below your listing. Someone will see that, and also bid low, and the next lowball listing will go to them. The more people are selling, the faster this happens. This snowballs - it's how the "sticky" pricing created by the last 5 history tends to collapse.

I'm not describing econ 101 theory to you here. I see this month in and month out in our market. I have seen it happen through multiple dramatic increases in market supply of different items.

Some specific examples:

• Price of nearly of everything that Tickets could create when the AE came out and blasted huge amounts of tickets into the game through widespread exploits. Despite the fact that huge quantities of inf were also being produced, the price of recipes nearly across the board crashed. This reversed immediately - the very same day - when severe ticket caps were introduced and most of the well-known initial farms were squashed.
• Prices of popular uncommon IOs after I16 enabled anyone who could to take the heat to turn their own level 50 missions into farms by turning up their team size. After a week or so, pool A uncommon enhancements dropped to anywhere from 1/5th to 1/10th their prior price.
• Price of Pool C recipes when A-Merits came out. The regular price of nearly every expensive crafted item decreased within one week, and trended downward for another week or two. Most of them are now between 50% and 80% of what they were before A-Merits were introduced.
• Price of level 50 common and uncommon salvage after I19 introduced Incarnates as a reason to play a lot at level 50. I play on high team size settings all the time. I'm always swimming in salvage, and I always sell all of it. I am extremely sensitive to changes in high-level common and uncommon salvage sale prices. I now list at just over 1/5 of what I used to in order to get an immediate sale, with only rare exception created by the occasional exhausting of supply.

I'm not so foolish as to believe that there are never cases where this doesn't apply, but I think it's borne out as an incredibly likely scenario, and most of the edge cases where it doesn't apply are usually very difficult to clearly identify, because they're actually the result of multiple simultaneous changes that actually have competing market impacts.

I don't think you shouldn't state your opinion; I think the reason why you feel that no one agrees with you is that you are (in my opinion) unnecessarily antagonistic.

*Yanks all bids on single colored belts; places bids on reversible belts*

Yes, if you assume we all list more and burn the inf we get into prestige for our SGs, prices will drop. If we don't burn the inf to prestige, where are we all going to spend that inf, other than the market? Green pills @50 a pop? I don't think that's going to cut it. Sitting as a number on my characters ID? Doesn't help me kill mobs better. I'm going to spend what I get on buying new stuff that makes me more effective.

I don't understand why the only thing you focus on is "more will get listed and prices will drop!" Sure, in a very short term, that's possible. Happens on a daily basis when people quit for the night and go list their junk on the AH. I don't see those listing spurts lowering prices on the AH in general over time.

I'm not claiming that changes to drop rates wouldn't be a market shock and prices wouldn't dance around. I'm claiming that with a given (larger than yesteryear) amount of inf in the game, that people are still going to spend it (or try to), and thus the market will remain inflated compared to the old prices. You might change what exactly is pricey at the moment, particularly if you vary the drop ratios between what is 'uber' and just 'decent', but you won't change the general truth that the market/economy as a whole has cost inflation going on.

True dat. But for some items (let's say lvl 20-30 uncommon recipes/IOs) there is no incentive for sellers. I would list a lvl 22 Air Burst at 5,000 if I knew I could sell it there right away. But I usually vendor or delete it. If there is a bid for it, and I offer at 5,000 and make no sale, then I know the bidder is lowballing and most of the time I'm better off just deleting it. I eat my 250inf listing fee and delete it.

I would argue that in order for supply to increase, demand needs to be more verbal and to step up their game. If you want to buy something, stop complaining about the lack of supply and put in a real bid, not a token "boy, I'd like one of these someday, bid 10 @ 1 each" bid. And advertise it here.

This doesn't make any sense to me. This argument is the very reason that prices drop. With the same amount of money flowing around, the system can't sustain the same items being sold more often at the old prices - doing so would take more money than everyone has.

You seem to be describing the scenario where we all start getting, I don't know, 10x as many LotGs as we do now. What do you think that would do to prices? How much money do you think we would make on that? Do you really think we would all start earning billions and billions of inf? I do not. If we all started swimming in LotGs, the price would go into the toilet.

It's handy that you ignored the extremely explicit examples I gave, all of which were long term except for the initial I14 AE exploits, which lasted about three weeks.

The real, "this actually happened" examples disagree with you, in general.

Even if we don't burn that inf as prestige, we still burn 10% in Wentworth's fees. It's a much slower burn, but it is a burn.

This "take more money" makes absolutely no sense. How does an increase in transaction rate take more money than exists in the economy? It isn't like what you paid for an IO left the economy -- it just went to a different player. Yes, there is a 10% fee skimmed off the top, so if we double the speed of sales at the market we're now taking out money from the economy at a faster rate. Yet as long as that "money out" rate due to fees is less than the "money in" inf rate incoming from killing mobs and vendoring trash recipe/salvage, inflation is going to continue, and the market is going to continue to be expensive.

"prices drop" doesn't mean people selling at the new price aren't still getting inf to spend on something else.

Great! I got part of my +rech build cheap. Now I have more money left and need the FF +rech proc, a couple of 5pc crushing impacts, and some purples. I've got more cash to spend on them. What happened to prices? Average across the market: did they fall? (answer: probably not.) LotG might have dropped. The rest just probably rose because suddenly I have more of my budget available to allocate to them.

Of course I ignored your examples. You focused on a tiny little slice of the market in each and said, "oh my god look the prices of pool C dropped" and ignored that the rest of the market probably rose just a little to compensate. Given the size of the rest of the market relative to pool C and in particular that of the big winners in C, four of them are uniques (stealths, miracle, nummies) it's likely that without access to the full transaction log we probably couldn't even measure any increase in the rest of the market. It'd get lost in the noise of individual sale fluctuations.

In terms of the OP's (seeming) goal of "reduce prices at the market" altering the relative supply of things (which is all that all of your examples are) on the market fails. It reduces some prices and increases others, but it does NOTHING to reduce the inf oversupply in the game. And that's what really drives prices (up) at the market. Not buyers. Not sellers. Not supply. The total amount of inf in game (or, I suppose, MAXINT) is the only thing that puts a price cap on the market.

Boosting the supply of recipes will reduce the amount of time you probably need to invest to get what you want. Which might actually be the OP's real goal: easy mode. But it won't reduce prices at the market overall. It might alter what's costly, but the whole thing is still going to be $$$,$$$,$$$ expensive.

Truth! Unfortunately any increase in drop rates also increases the trash recipes (there's some in every pool) that get vendored. You've got to now further boost market transaction speed to have that 10% fee > inf intake.

I would hope we could all at least agree there's more inf floating around in game now than there was, for example, three years ago. The 10% fee isn't big enough to counteract all the inf sources.

I dont have alot of hate. Im a very very funny guy most of the time. I just strongly disagree in this case.

And Ubes, can i has my purps back? I haent got many lately due to PLing in the AE and getting tickets. I just thought it was a pitiful funny that i ran a farm real fast and got like 6 temp recipes. System is still borked, imo. Hell, why can't it just drop crappy recipes at least instead of all the temp crap?