What to do about Market Blockers?

What are "standing offers?" Are you talking about bids to buy or listings to sell? I can't see how anything we're talking about would have 2700 outstanding bids, so I assume you're talking offers to sell, but I think of a "standing offer" as an offer to buy, so I wanted to be clear.

If you don't buy them out, I doubt the rest of the market will. I expect the market to settle around your current buy price. You're setting the price floor. Only the very impatient will shoot past your new floor all the way into the depths of that bid stack 1200 deep. If you want that to happen, you're going to have to spend more and erode that stack more deeply.

If you want to actually prove anything you need proof so yes please do take screenshots. Make sure you show your actual sale prices.

Well, going by the market you are lying about one of those numbers. If you are buying things under 3K inf and that is less than the vendor price you must be buying rares. However no rares with a sell price anywhere near the vendor range have anywhere near 1000 for sale. However assuming you're simply wrong about the vendor price but right about the number for sale I would say you're flipping either energy weapons or boresights.

Okay. While you're doing that, I just made 150 million inf profit with a time investment of about 10 minutes, utilizing 5 transaction slots, on an "active toon". Took only a few hours for the posted items to sell.

But you go on ahead and wait a week for your clever scheme to come together.

Awesome! Good luck with the experiment, and I'm looking forwards to the results.

It would be cool if as well as screenshots you could make a note of how much time it takes you to manage the niche: to log in, flip the stacks over, vendor excess salvage etc.

Actually, people who are not in a hurry and seem inactive... sound kind of like casual players to me.

I'm not seeing a problem here. If one guy puts in 200 low bids that never get filled, why would anyone care if he's wasting his time? Go ahead and place hundreds of bids of 11 inf on luck charms. Absolutely nothing will happen.

Or maybe the bids do get filled, but they can't be filled until after the other 10 people all got their items, so... what's the problem again? Put in a few hundred low bids on rubies or something. I'm sure they'll all fill. And I'm sure my bids at 500 will also fill. So what?

Sure, there are price spikes sometimes. They generally don't last long. If you're patient, you'll seldom even notice them. Whether they're caused by mean people or random fluctuations doesn't really matter.

If it's really a problem for you, there are a variety of solutions available:

* Fulmens approach: put a bunch on sale at high prices, to act as a cushion
* Keep a bunch of salvage in your base
* Keep a stash of AE tickets, brainstorms, whatever for non-market acquisitions
* Be patient

A problem with so many solutions isn't worth getting worked up about.

Or they could be the ones who log in, check the market, go run some missions or a TF, and notice out the corner of their eye when something they want is bought while they're off doing other things.

You have interesting ideas about what people who make money on the market do. Those ideas are interesting because of how divorced from reality they seem to be.

"Exponentially" should be added to the list of words you ought to look up, when you're done with "supply" and "demand".

I'm having a hard time imagining this anthropomorphized market that is able to "see" anything. Consider re-wording for clarity.

The one person who puts out 200 low bids won't buy anything, though, while the 10 people who put in high bids will. I think that's kind of the opposite of having their will "subverted". I'm struggling to come up with how anything is being subverted, in fact, when consumers who were willing to pay more got to buy the product.

Have fun with the salvage experiment, btw. If I need anything out of your niche, I'm sure I'll completely have my day ruined if I need to pay above vendor price because I'm too lazy to go kill some minions or wait 10 minutes for a bid to fill. I hope you'll be happy with yourself then, young man!

I interpreted that as "bought everything up to 3000 inf in one shot, then left stacks of bids at 200 or something."

I'm trying to not mock this experiment, because I did similar things when I was new to the market and trying to work things out.

Uber, just about every exchange in the world with the exception of the US real estate market uses the term "offer" as an order to sell and the term "bid' as an order to buy. It's a crying shame that CoX put that word "Offer" on the button when you want to buy something.

It's worse than "flammable" and "inflammable".

"Offer" can be used either way in English, and is frequently used both ways. In CoX's double blind market's context, 'offer' makes more sense the way it does due to the connotations behind the word.

That's because people make false assumptions about the origin of 'inflammable' (not that the common pronunciation helps that). Inflammable means something is able to be inflamed... Inflame + able = inflammable. Far from the only time that English's rules would lead you to the totally wrong conclusion.

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!

Perhaps that's true in a market context, which would certainly be appropriate here, but in the vernacular, when you want to buy something you "make an offer".

I'm willing to bet most of us did. I know I did (I will rule the Spirit Thorns!). Didn't end well.

And I suspect it's why this sort of (attempted) manipulation seems to happen with greater frequency these days: More and more people deciding to play with the market, each one of them almost invariably engaging in those very same experiments--hey, I wonder if I can do this--and eventually deciding, 'Wow, this blows! There's gotta be better ways to make a profit...'

...then discovering that there are.

That's why the financial markets switched to bid and offer instead of offer to buy and offer to sell a few hundred years ago to make things clearer. It's not a big deal, but generally if someone refers to an "offer" without a qualification as to buy or sell, it is an offer to sell.

I just made a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm offering to sell it to you for $300 million. Of course, you'll have to reheat it once it arrives. Offer works in either context.

I never said it didn't. I said what was being described was unclear. I responded to Yomo about why it was unclear. I will undoubtedly ask for clarification if I see it in the future, because even though I now understand its context in market terms, very few people speak in that context. No one I know in real life would speak of an offer to sell as "an offer" in an unqualified way. Edit: Meaning it's not safe for me to assume what someone means when saying that, because only a limited subset of people consistently use it that way.

It actually gets a lot worse: "At" and "For" are used as shortcuts for selling and buying respectively. "10 at $50" and "10 for $50" mean entirely different things, and when it comes up before an arbitration board, as it will any time someone loses money, the person who used the wrong word is out money.

A little experimentation is good. And getting saddled with a few thousand boresights might add some perspective to the OP.

I think that anyone who assumes some sort of conspiracy is working against them should try to prove out their assumptions. After all, even paranoids have enemies.

And even though it's an experiment that's been done before, there can still be value in repeating it. I used to work in science, and sometimes it paid to check even work that's been peer reviewed, published, and cited in multiple places. Sometimes -- even if rarely -- it *is* wrong. Probably not in this case, but I still think it's admirable for the OP to put the work in to try to produce their own evidence, rather than taking the more popular route of unilaterally declaring victory and taking their bat home.

Heh. Oddly, if I heard those used that way, I think I would have interpreted them correctly.

Yeah.

I tried this once. I was on my Thorns Dom, had a few million and there was a low supply of say...Clockwork Gears. I bought them all, then another showed up. I had to pay much more for that one...and the other one...until I realized I just didn't have enough inf (I had 12,000,000 on me at the time) to buy ALL the supply, because the supply was INFINITE! Thus I learned a hard lesson, that if I was going to try and flip or corner something...salvage wasn't the best place to start.

Leading to the question that shows up every time one plays Settlers of Catan: Wood for sheep?

I'm going to use Yomo_Kimyata's definitions from here out. I meant to say that there were approximately 2700 offers out when I started, and I snatched up about 1400 of them with bids under 3000 inf. There were between 1200 and 1300 left after the first night. The number has been dwindling since then as genuine bidders buy out the more expensive stuff. Meanwhile, I clear out all the low offers.

That's fine with me. I've been filling up my buy slots with offers under the vendor price. So far I've carried over 200 of them over to the vendor to make room to set up more low offers.



The 3000 is not less than the vendor price. The vendor price is 1000. I just did that as a one time thing to clear them out, and I post short-lived bids at that price when I log on just to make sure they're still cleared out. All my standing bids are much lower than 1k.

I agree. This is actually the best solution. I started a second experiment seeing if that would work, and it did work very well. I have a toon assigned to buy human blood samples at 1000 and sell them at 20,000. It's not a huge profit for me, but it prevents anyone else from being able to raise the price above 20,000. I'd set it even lower, but I'm mostly just trying to safeguard the price so it doesn't reach absurd levels like 200,000 like it's been doing from time to time over the last few weeks.

If everyone who's feeling civic minded would choose a type of salvage, and assign a toon to safeguarding it, the problem I'm all concerned about would probably go away. I still find I've made about a million inf every time I log onto that toon. It's small potatoes, but I'm certainly not losing money.

When I did it, it prevented the price from ACCIDENTALLY going above [in my case] 50K- any determined person could have ripped through my price safeguards with trivial ease. Of course, I was doing 10 each of 12 types, so I had no real depth to my defense, but it still blocked a few price surges and slowed down some more. The higher you set your sell point, the less frequently it's going to get hit and the less work you're doing.

Anything with legitimately high demand compared to supply [Alchemical Silver being the classic example] is going to attract flippers which tends to drive the low price up- and drives the high price down- but the prices are going to be high anyway because, as mentioned, legitimately high demand.

By the way, when we dumped ten thousand Luck Charms (or whatever the number was) prices went CRAZY. Instead of a nice constant 45-50 thousand inf, they were selling for 5 thousand to 200 thousand- in a 2 minute period. There were none for sale in the middle range any more.