Common Salvage - Should they be purchasable at a static price?

Often on my toons, while purchasing off level common sets, I find myself wondering if common salvage should be unlimitedly available at a set price. I, myself, understand that I can put low bids on common salvage, wait 24 hours, and usually have them filled but I think it limits a lot of lower level toons and more casual players from entering into the IO marketplace. I think this stifles a lot of the demand for lower, off-level recipes as well.

I find it rather amusing that I can usually find a Bruising Blow or other undesirable low level sets on the market for 5 000 - 100 000, but often the salvage required to craft them in any sort of hurry could run you anywhere from 100 000 to 1 000 000. If you had the option of buying salvage like that, it would speed up a lot of the process and take out a lot of the tedium of slotting low level toons.

I wouldn't want them to touch higher level salvage at all and I don't think this would affect other aspects of the market negatively either. What do you think?

I don't see why it should be available for a static price, especially as you can get it cheap with AE tickets.

Common salvage can only be picked at random, but considering each piece only costs 8 tickets and you have a 1/6 chance of getting the one you want....

Besides, if you could buy it from stores people would do that instead of buying from the lowbies generating the stuff, and then we'd be back to doing inf transfers just to pay for SOs.

My the theory of random commons for cheap in AE was "People will roll till get what they want, and dump the rest on the market at a profit." But I have no more inside information than you do.

Right now, yes, things cost half a million inf apiece if you buy it nao. [I'm thinking of Steel, which you can specifically buy with tickets... but there's over a thousand Scientific Theories at really high prices, and maybe a dozen at reasonable prices at any given time. It doesn't look like a shortage, but it is. ]

But right now, we're still in the double XP hangover. I don't know why the AE people haven't been giving in to the obvious demand and throwing giant chunks of salvage up on the market, but they haven't.

EDIT: Or if they have, it hasn't been enough.

A lot of casual players don't know that they can get commons with tickets. Some of them may not realise that you can leave a bid up overnight... or for five minutes. I don't know how much they are educable, either, unless I want to rant in Freedom broadcast every night.

By that definition, Black B, would some secret way to buy salvage for cash really help them?

Lets see

Plus side

1. really great inf sink
2. Makes the crafting process friendlier and more accessible to everyone


Down side ?
Some people lose their ability to play with luck charms and alchemical silver ?

Oh, yeah its another venue closed for the people that view the market as their personal domains. A plus as far as I am concerned

Edit most people wouldn't like the pricing I would set
50K commons
150K uncs
4mil rare

But I suspect guaranteed instant fills would be worth it for many.

There's no lack of upper-tier salvage (41-50), and the lower tier (1-25) isn't bad either. It's the middle tier that has the problem.

AE tickets already act as an off-market pressure valve of sorts. I'd also like to see an ability to convert salvage from one tier to another. For example, transform three pieces of common upper-tier salvage into one random piece of mid-tier common salvage. That would help to balance supply among the tiers.

Price fixing is never a good idea.

One more thing: if they start making lower-level TF's weekly strike target, we're going to be swimming in salvage for that level range.

I don't know if Alchemical Silver is ever going to crash all the way. If you play SR, Force Fields, Ice Armor, Ninjitsu, etc. etc. and you slot with generics you're using about six Accuracies [one Alch Silver each] and about twelve Defenses [one Alch Silver each]. The demand is high and legitimate.

I like Intrinsic's idea of a "three to one" [or maybe six to one? ten to one?] conversion between high level and random mid level commons. It seems inelegant to me that there be 20,000 of one common salvage [mathematical proofs? Don't remember the specific one] and 7 to 14 of another, although that's an aesthetic judgement and not something I can defend. I'd even narrow it down and say arcane goes to arcane and tech goes to tech.

I've been trying to figure out a way to do conversions that doesn't suck, and I think this more or less works. It doesn't flood the market with rares [temporarily or permanently], it doesn't take the work out of the game, it doesn't allow cherrypicking and it doesn't massively devalue anything. A 6-to-1 conversion sets the price of an Alchemical Silver to be about 36 "some tier 3 common" which means, as we've seen from inspiration combining, that the price of a spirit thorn/regen flesh/kin weapon/whatever will go up, eventually.

For people like me who want to see inf burn, maybe they could put a 250 inf charge on the conversion. 1500 inf here, 1500 inf there, pretty soon... no, you're still not talking real money.

It might be simpler to allow 10-to-1 [or 6-to-1 or 20-to-1] conversion into Brainstorms. If we say that 1/2 of rares are valuable [most of the middle and high end, and none of the low end] that pins the value of a valuable rare to about 400 of the cheapest commons in the game. Right now there are 25,000 Mathematic Proofs [I just checked] so that would become, hmm, 125 Rare Salvage, of which about 62 are vendor trash. Doesn't seem like it would flood the market. You'd get a bit more than that because there are well over 25,000 Mathematic Proofs that got deleted as a waste of space... but the market could absorb another 62 Rare Salvage pretty easily.

My lower level characters love the fact that I can throw up all the salvage they receive at 10 inf and get back enough money to buy whatever I need when I'm leveling. That's the other side of the equation here.

If there was a fixed cost way to get low level salvage, my lowbies would lose out on this easy and painless source of funds.

It might, dare I say it, even be a bad thing for the mythical unicorn otherwise known as the casual player if this source of easy money was cut off while leveling.

Seeing as how ONE mission by a 50 can pretty much get you the funds you need for any type of salvage, plus there is the AE, PLUS a lowbie getting ONE drop can potentially get the funds to buy what he/she needs in one shot (new player or not) . . . no I don't think it's necessary that they be purchasable.