Marketeering-Anti

There are many forms of marketeering. Some are a benefit to just the marketeer. Some are a benefit to everyone (marketeer and consumers). Some are mostly a benefit to consumers.

I can assure you that due to the high volume of level 50 play recently that a whole lot of niches collapsed.

Some marketeers just let their niches go fallow and figured they'd come back later. In these cases the recipes usually tanked to no bids and thus like 1-5k to buy one. The fully-crafted IOs on the other hand often went up in price as their supply dropped. For people who only buy the IOs the loss of their marketeer was a net loss (despite the fact that the marketeer was making a profit before and still could be). Also damaged were the people selling recipes as they were now making only a pittance for something of value. The only people benefitting were those who buy recipes and craft them for their own use.

Other marketeers continued on and provided a floor for recipe price. In these cases recipe prices dropped some but not to 0 bids.......so recipe sellers got less but something more than vendoring for their trouble of popping the recipes. IO prices usually stayed about the same or dropped in relation to how much the recipes dropped. Everyone saw some gains here for the most part though probably the marketeer the least.

Finally, other marketeers saw a drop in price and decided to buy recipes AND fully crafted IOs below a certain point. In these cases a hard floor was made on the recipes and IOs which provided a profit point to sellers of the dropped recipes and guaranteed the marketeers a certain profit. The guaranteed profits came with a time commitment cost and some risk as they had to be willing to take significant stock on board to keep prices stabilized while very few buyers and many sellers were in the market. I can assure you I did this with one niche and even on a high-end level 50 drop it was hard to keep things stable as 2-3x normal supply coarsed in....and 1/3rd to 1/2 normal buying demand went out. I went from having about 20 of the IO in base on stock to about 300 in 2 weeks. Of course my average cost to craft went from 65M/ to 31M/ over the same time. For a while selling prices dropped to 40M so I was taking some risk...but now they have re-risen to 75M. I could raise the price even more now since I control about 85% of current stock available if I wanted (the 2 days I forgot to list any prices spiked to 100M+ briefly) but I won't cause its bad for business to encourage others back into this niche.

Does the final way mostly benefit marketeers? I don't know.......if I'd done nothing, prices on the recipe would have tanked and encouraged people to vendor or delete this usually very valuable recipe. Will I make a whole lot of inf? (my estimates are I'll make about 6.6B in post-market fee profits over the next 2 mos from this play) Sure....but I'm also providing a stabilizing mechanism to the market in return in a way that JP Morgan used to before there was a federal reserve. Additionally I've provided about 6B in profits to those who popped the recipes in the first place (my suppliers) AND allowed a lot of players to have access to a nice IO at minimal work.

The fact that prices spiked when I didn't list my stuff shows me that I am providing a useful service even if I am being compensated well for it. Show me how keeping prices lower by crafting is bad. I'm waiting.