What to do about Market Blockers?

I made a thread about this a few months ago. If the market works as we think it does, this should be impossible. If there is a bid outstanding and your offer is at that level or lower, there should be an insta-sell so long as you are not both the buyer and the seller (You can't sell to yourself on the same character, obviously). I GUESS that this only occurs when someone else locks the market on a single character at 1 (i.e., has both bids and offers at 1). They can't sell to themselves, so the system has a hissy-fit, and that screws over other people looking to sell their stuff at 1.

This is a rare case, but probably IS something the developers might want to look at. Although in the global scale of things, I'd rather see mace/ice scrappers.

Good point, and that would easily hold a few hours worth of most salvage types.

Yup, and that's when they'll decide to delete it rather than post it.

No they won't. They'll decide it's not worth the hassle and just delete it.


Or... instead of deleting it you could pack it all over to the friendly neighborhood IO/SO vendor and sell it for the vendor price.

The irony is that most of the casual players are listing their salvage at that price or lower anyway just to get rid of it fast. So, your low ball bid could be equal to or less than the price you get to just carry it over to a store, and you'd still net most of it.

And that would explain why the market is so much easier to deal with in the wee hours of the morning. Too bad most of the people who play the game aren't on then to experience it.

Also there is nothing wrong with letting sales get by you when you're not on. The artificial scarcity doesn't take hours to build up.

If your lowball bid is higher than 275/1100/5500, then it's still more profitable to throw the salvage on the market and take your inf than go to a vendor. Especially if you've got enough lowball bids up that you're soaking up all the supply -- the sellers get a guaranteed instant sale at higher than vendor price. Win!

If your lowball bid is less than vendor price, then there is nothing to stop people putting the item on for 275/1100/5500 (or even 1 inf above your lowball price) and leaving it to sell. After all, you're now providing a great service for those sellers -- you are sucking that lower-priced supply out of the market at your expense, and leaving them with the lowest item listed for the next bidder to come along. And, generally, items sell for more than the listing price.

Remember that when the seller comes to the market, they will see your hundreds or thousands of lowball bids listed. You've created the impression of demand. You're *encouraging* people to list, and with your lowball bid you've created a price floor -- a floor that you're going to have to keep raising if you want to keep control.

Your lowball bids will have to rise as people start pricing just above. Your high listings will have to fall as people start pricing just below. With, as someone points out above, an awful lot of work and very little profit, you've made that item *better* for people who want to sell it on the market.

You know when most people vendor/delete salvage? When they get to the market and there are 10,000 Temporal Analyzers listed for sale and no bids. And, really, at that point does deleting a stack of 10 make any difference to anyone?

I'm not sure if you're actually serious here, but, okay.

A level 45+ has 50 basic salvage slots. Assuming that your lowball bids were all for 1 inf and ignoring the purchase cost, then you can make either 12,500, 50,000 or 250,000 per trip, depending on whether you were picking up commons, uncommons or rares (and I can't think of many rares that are going to fill fast at 1 inf lowball bids).

Short of spending all their time dancing under the Atlas statue, I can't think of many less profitable ways for a level 50 character to make inf.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I've actually spent a while doing this, back before the market merger and the ability to email inf. I made quite a few million inf, and got several toons well off to afford basic SOs/some IOs in the early levels... But mind you, I could have made far more money a crap ton of other ways, including but not limited to flipping, crafting, playing on a 50 and transferring it over, dancing under atlas and waiting until I found myself in a CC by mistake and won.

The amount of money to be had from vendor salvage is actually less than what I was getting, because I was selling common IOs (that went for 35 to 160x the return of common/uncommon salvage)- and the amount of money I made was tiny... very tiny. I had to invest a lot of time in buying and vendoring, resulting in a joke of a inf/minute value.


This was the early days of the market. Eventually I realized how much more profitable it was to craft the same common IOs and post them on the market. It took a bit longer to get the first return, but the profit was obscenely higher, something that vendoring junk would never catch up to (I probably made no more than 10 million vendoring junk over quite a few months spread over a dozen+ characters... in one month, on one character, I made closer to 150 million inf from crafting recipes I bought on the market...).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

I never used to, but now, with so many people playing 50s, I sell for less than 5 inf. My goal is not profit, but badges. I want more market slots, on everyone I play.

All my 50s at this point are close to "done" builds, thick with traditional high-price poster child IOs like LotGs, Miracles/Numinas and with purples and PvPOs thrown in to suit taste. They all individually have a bare minimum of 1B inf and 1000 Reward Merits in their inventory. I don't care if I lose a few inf occasionally by listing salvage super low. My 50s sweat inf from their pores. (Regardless, I rarely ever do lose out that way.)

All my 50s have at least 62 salvage inventory slots, though some have 83 thanks to Inventions crafting. I usually cart around something like 10-20 pieces of salvage I don't want to sell immediately.

That means when I come to the market after running a few missions, I want to dump somewhere in the vicinity of 50-70 pieces of common salvage. I want them to move, because in a few missions, I'll be back with more. I'm the CoH market equivalent of a dump truck, backing up and unloading huge stacks of stuff, sometimes on two characters simultaneously. (I have two accounts.)

Before I 19, I never felt compelled to list any common high level salvage for less than 10 inf. Now, if I list for 10 or more, it will sometimes sit there for a day or more. There are too many people listing for under 10 inf. So now I have to list for even less.

This is why I think the OP's discussion is so bizarre. It's not people conducting sweep-and-flip operations that's keeping selling prices so low. It's oversupply. It's people like me, who are supplying the market to a fault, because there is something I get for doing so.

This so much. I just came back a few weeks ago, having left not too long after the market merger (around when GR launched... or was the merger earlier than I remembered? either way...), the first thing I noticed with the current market is the massive amount of items listed. Before, especially on redside, it wasn't unusual for there to be zero common salvage for sell! And let me tell you, there was definitely a lot of demand. The same items that were crap back then are still crap now (like Kinetic Weapon)... but back then, I'd barely be motivated to list it because there were maybe a couple hundred for sell... Now there's, what, 15,000? The market has only gotten better for the buyers... and also somehow better for the sellers (not quite sure how that could be possible, but it definitely is, either side of the coin you're on at any given time).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

My theory is that some people are in a hurry to sell, so they list really low. Other people are not in a hurry to sell, and they want to get as much inf as possible, so they list really high. Other people do something in the middle.

Sometimes, a lot of sellers come all at once and put a lot of items in the market for a lot of different prices. Other times, a lot of buyers come all at once and buy a lot of items. First they buy the cheap ones. Then they buy the medium priced ones. Then they buy the expensive ones.

Then some more sellers come. Then some more buyers come. Etc. Etc. Etc.

See how my theory explains the exact same thing, but without anyone being an evil jerk trying to ruin your day? We can't prove which theory is more likely or more accurate. You can choose to believe you're surrounded by jerks who are ripping you off, or you can choose to believe that market fluctuations are just as random as loot drops.

Why, if that was true, when I listed 10 for a slightly extortionate rate, I would sometimes have sold only 5 or 6 before supply came back in! Madness!

My theory is that prices are driven up by people who are extremely impatient or sloppy in their typing. This fits with the old saying, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

I haven't been very clear. Impatience is not the problem. Patience is. Ideally everyone would be equally impatient to finish their transactions, but a certain loophole in the game makes it so certain people don't have to be impatient. Marketeers can alt their way to having massive available storage space.

Making the game fun for players who primarily focus on going out and killing stuff is my objective. Players who primarily focus on killing stuff run out of salvage space fast, because they're getting salvage drops. They also run out of market space, because those 30 salvage items usually aren't all the same kind. It's not uncommon to show up at WW with over 20 different salvage types in your inventory, and only about 5 minutes to spare before your team will want to start the next mission.

The game was, and has always been geared toward collaborative play. There's a reason Task Forces require X number of players to start them.


So now let's look at the two kinds of buyers:

Buyer Type 1 ) - An active toon making recipes.

Type 1 doesn't buy any more salvage than exactly what they need for the recipes in their possession. Why? Because their salvage storage would fill up too fast if they did that. Bulk bidding makes it harder to fit the things you need.

Buyer Type 2) - A Marketeer looking to manipulate the market.

Type 2 isn't trying to make recipes. They can afford to cram their entire storage up with just one type of item. Bulk bidding is the optimal strategy, because there isn't always a bidder around when a seller decides to list something, and most active toon sellers will take whatever price they can get rather than delete salvage to make room for new drops.

Now let's look at the two types of sellers:

Seller Type 1) - An active toon trying to make room in their inventory.

Type 1's priority is getting back into the action. The only way they would have time to wait for salvage to sell overnight is if they had unlimited transaction space at WW. Otherwise, they need those transaction slots to open up quickly so they cram more salvage and recipes into them quickly, in order to keep up with the drop rate.

The alternative would be to run 1-5 missions per session, then stop playing until tomorrow so all your salvage can sell. However, that really sucks, if you enjoy playing the character and it's the weekend, and you normally have to work all day. (People with jobs are the best kind of customers for an MMO to market to, because they have money.)


Seller Type 2) - A marketeer with lots of inventory space

Type 2 is no hurry to sell. They can patiently wait until boredom (not a good feeling for players to experience in an MMO) or desperation drives an IO maker to just give in and pay up.


The problem right now is that Buyer Type 1 and Seller Type 1 are often unable to connect with each other. Seller Type 1 is in a hurry, and post their salvage at whatever price they can get right now (because it's not fun to wait, and games are supposed to be fun). If they're very lucky, a Buyer Type 1 also just happens to have an active bid up just that very second. If they're not lucky (and most won't be), the next player to post a bid will be a Buyer Type 2. (Or rather, a standing bulk bid will be the most readily available.)


Buyer Type 1 is in a bit of a hurry, but not at severely as Seller Type 1. Buyer type 1 can wait a little while, but their salvage needs are very diverse (because recipes have diverse requirements), so they can't spare a lot of market slots or they'd be busy making those recipes for a long time. (Also they might be planning to go do fun stuff like killing mobs during the same session, rather than devoting 5+ hours to just sitting at WW.)

If a lot of people are on, and Buyer Type 1 is patient enough wait just a few minutes, they can post a bid at a reasonable price and the next Seller Type 1 will sell to them. Fine, but if there were 10 Seller Type 1's on during the next few minutes, and they all list for 5 inf each, and a Buyer Type 2 is present, then 9 of those Seller Type 1's will end up selling to eh Buyer Type 2, and only 1 will connect with the Buyer Type 1.


Analysis:

Buyer Type 1 experiences the market as though there were only a few Seller Type 1's (when in fact there are many of them.)

Seller Type 1 experiences the market as though it were overwhelmingly dominated by Buyer Type 2's.

The problem is that the people who are not in a hurry to sell are not active toons. The patient ones are marketeer toons that only log on for a few minutes a day to change their auction settings. Marketeers have exponentially more inventory space available to them than active players do, so patience is a luxury that costs them nothing.

The best way to sum up the problem is ..... imagine an auction where 200 people show up who are only willing to pay 5 bucks for an once of gold, and 10 people show up who are willing to pay 500 bucks for an ounce of gold. At WW..... if one person puts out a bulk bid for 200 ounces of gold at 5 bucks each, but 10 people each put out single bids at 500 bucks an ounce, the market sees 200 low bids vs. 10 high bids.

In a situation where the will of 10 people is being subverted by 1 person, that 1 person will have an enjoyable experience, and the 10 will not. Do you see how that's a bad business model for an MMO?

Except most of the time when you see 200 bidders, they are not 200 separate bidders. That's one player using 2 or 3 toons to set up a bulk bid.




They're not trying to ruin my day. They're just trying to make money and inadvertently ruining it.

The problem is that very few people are ruining very many days. Accident or no accident, it really should have a stop put to it.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

There are more than two kinds of buyers.

Then they ain't much of a marketeer, as far as I'm concerned.

No one's making serious inf mucking around with salvage.

There are more than two types of sellers.

Is based on incomplete information, false assumptions and a very narrow view of what qualifies as "valid" gameplay. I don't know of any players who operate strictly in the ways you describe, and I know quite a few.

Not necessarily true and, in my experience, it's often not.

No. While it's possible, it's very unlikely, for the simple reason that it just isn't worth the trouble. I'm sure this happens here and there (and happens more often than it used to), but, I'm sorry, I don't buy that it's "most of the time". That is in no way a given. Marketeers have much, much, MUCH more profitable things they can be doing with those slots (and with less risk involved).

Again, no.

I've been keeping up with this thread and it seems to me that, ultimately, you're making the same complaint that's been made many times before: that the market isn't a store.

Well, no, it isn't a store. It's a market. That's the point. "Market PVP" was part of the design.

If you don't like it... well, hey, don't use it. It's entirely optional. Need salvage? Go run an AE arc and buy it with tickets. Want a recipe? Buy it with merits. It's possible to avoid the market entirely. I know, I've done it.

So, if your day has been ruined, you've only yourself to blame.

What compelled me to post, though, is your underlying assertion that your play preferences somehow make you a superior customer and player (it's interesting to me, by the way, how often the aforementioned complaint goes hand-in-hand with this attitude).

An MMO, to be successful, should be trying to accommodate as many preferences and playstyles as possible, don't you think? The market engages a whole lot of people who wouldn't be so engaged otherwise. So that's a good thing. Meanwhile, people who don't care for it can ignore it. Also a good thing. The market, as it stands, seems to be a positive addition to the game.

So what 'fix' do you suggest that wouldn't completely destroy a part of the game that many people enjoy? What would "put a stop to it" in such a way that would satisfy you, while still preserving the dynamics that are keeping others interested?

My guess is that you don't have one. My guess is, you've decided those players are doing it wrong and are thus undeserving of consideration.

You're paranoid. That's really how to sum it up. You're basically trying to say 'there's the good players that use the market as little as possible, and the EBIL MARKETEREREERERSSSSSSS THAT RUIN OUR LIVES!!!!!!'. The problem is, the things you're claiming they're doing to screw you over can be easier explained by natural causes (by actions of the so-called 'good players'!)... and the marketers have already told you, those things would be massively time consuming and also not close to as profitable as most anything else.

Stop actively trying to ruin other peoples funs by trying to destroy the market. You're ultimately doing what you're claiming to be actively fighting against.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

This is gonna blow your mind: some people are patient marketeers who also play the game actively.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that this is true. None at all. It exists only in your mind. Our market provides no information on who is selling what, or why they are selling, or whether they put things on the market and log off or go on and play their character in a manner you approve of.

This completely undercuts your original, posted complaint. Buyer Type 2 is going to perform their bulk bidding well above the price at which seller Type 1 is listing salvage, because Buyer Type 2 wants to control as much of the supply as possible. They will immediately vacuum up all the listings provided by Seller Type 1, which makes Seller Type one very happy and able to go about their business, come back and shovel even more salvage at Buyer Type 2.

Amusingly, while Buyer Type 2 is making Seller Type 1 happy, Seller Type 1 is making Buyer Type 2's life a pain, forcing them to maintain their bid stacks more and more actively as they fill up.

This is part of why people are telling you that no one sane is doing this right now with High-Level Common or Uncommon Salvage, because a huge chunk of the playerbase is churning out high-level content and producing those salvage types at record volumes. The time when it's sane to try stunts like this is when supply is low, not when it's a raging torrent like unto which we have never before seen. (For example, it made some sense to flip High-Level salvage when the AE exploits were the rage, because very few people were producing salvage drops period.)

Fair, until the Seller Type 1's overload Buyer Type 2's bid stacks, Buyer Type 2 stops sweeping up sales, and Buyer Type 1 starts winning bids on the next Seller Type 1. There are way more Seller Type 1s in play than Buyer Type 2s. If you don't believe me, go and actually watch the market transactions for a piece of common salvage, like Silver or Nevermelting Ice, for a while. Buyer Type 2 appears as a set of consistent prices ticking off close together in time.

Edit: Let me very clear, Berzerker. I act as both Seller Type 1 and Buyer Type 1. I simply don't see what you're describing. I read and post in here not because I'm a marketeer who flips stuff or engages in market shenanigans. I read and post in here because I'm an extremely active market producer and consumer. I'm probably about as close to the type of market user the devs intended as can be, with the possible exception that I am probably more aware of its inner workings than they imagined a typical user being.

Bull. While I have a lot of toons, and I don't play all of them every day, my toons DO get played. And none of them are strictly "market only" toons.

Since everyone can have just as many character slots and market slots as I have, I'd like to know how you arrive at this assumption.

But you are right about one thing. Patience costs me nothing.



The best way to sum up the problem is that there are impatient people out there. As such, these people help drastically inflate the price of various items. This creates market niches that marketeers sell into to help stabilize the price and profit points.

No a "the will of the people" argument. This is NOT a democracy. And simply because 10 people who avoid the market most of them time feel gypped due to their own incompetence and impatience doesn't mean it's so.

This is an unprovable assumption. Likely a good assumption, but unprovable nonetheless.


But these players are not responsible for your emotional pyrotechnics. YOU are. I submit that if you're allowing yourself to get ticked off by the state of the market YOU are ruining your OWN day.

So, the devs should basically just kill the market for the sake of a couple people who narcissistically classify themselves as "the REAL players" because they can't get everything they want for cheap from the market. Never mind that they can get it for set price points from AE, merit vendors, and A-Merits?

Uhm. YeahNO.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

No. Impatience IS the problem. You can yell and scream all day that it isn't. But you're wrong. Period.

So you basically want to jack the game around to suit YOUR play style.

Just NO.

Here's four words for you.

• VENDOR
• VAULT
• STORAGE BINS

Sorry, but you need to stop trying to insist that everyone play the game the same way you do. It's NOT going to happen.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Actually, in blatant hypocrisy, I started one two days ago just to prove my point. Won't tell you which salvage type I'm targeting...... though maybe I should take a few screenshots.

With two inactive toons, and just over 1 million inf invested so far, I was able to clean out all standing offers under 3k inf. The total number of standing offers when I started was over 2700. It's now between 1200 and 1300. By the end of next week I think you'll see the effects.

Right now I just have to sit back and wait for genuine bidders to clear out those last 1200 offers I don't want to waste my own money on. I'm snapping up all the offers that list below vendor price.

And how much profit have you made? How much profit do you expect to make? With the amount of time you're going to have to spend to turn a profit, how many times more inf could you have made doing countless other things?


I'm also not seeing the 'problem'. You're buying everything up that's listed for under vendor price: Sellers are happy their stuff is moving faster. Buyers don't really care, because even vendor price is laughably low (mind you, I'm not like a lot of people here that have regularly hit the inf cap- I'd be surprised if my total net worth was more than a billion inf... that's all my inf, combined with all my enhancements/salvage/recipes! over several dozen characters).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!