Time to buy

New powerset coming. New players coming. Prices on a lot of things on the market (useful non-purple non-PVP sets that used to be valuable) have been pretty low -- time to buy?

I doubt I21 will hit live before mid-to-late September. Considering the guaranteed profit margins one can make from day to day, I don't see much point in making a gamble over 3 months.

Of course... Hold on, let me grab my tinfoil hat.

Got it. If I remember correctly, you are a pretty good day trader yourself. So could this be an attempt to get people to buy stuff so prices come back up?

According to the comparison chart for F2P/Premium/VIP perks, it appears to me that there will be fewer players who can benefit from Purp/PVP IO's and possibly even some of the rare sets will be restricted to just premium/VIP's altogether. Couple this with fewer overall slots per server available (to all but VIP's who look like they don't lose anything), and this means to me an overall reduction in demand for the hotter items.

Less demand (via mechanics) means less price until the supply monkey kicks in. And given we don't know yet what the Paragon Points can be spent against, its possible the supply monkey may quite small.

There's also, from that chart, the mystical "Limited" tag assigned to F2P and Premium players for Auction house use. Not entirely sure what that means....its possible that they won't actually EARN IO drops in missions or perhaps be limited to SO slotting only and therefore have no reason to visit the auction house to buy/sell at all? Or maybe the auction house "constants" will be expanded and thats how they can buy their SO's? Who knows?

I'd say prices are going to fall in the long term, although a short-term spike might happen as people like you try to instigate panic.

So the answer is "nobody knows anything yet."

But I'm curious why you'd expect demand to fall just because free accounts may not be able to purchase certain IOs. Are we assuming that a lot of the current player base would switch to free to play (or quit)? Because if they don't, then demand would remain about the same... or go up slightly if people have a reason to make & play new characters (which I guess we don't know, there's only the one new power set.)

Lots of questions though. Can F2P players gain recipe drops? Can they sell them? What happens if you pay for a month and totally IO out a character, and then go back to F2P, does that character benefit from the IO'd build?

Anyway I can answer the question about "why worry if you have guaranteed daily profit margins". If I can buy something cheaply now that might sell well later, then I'll stock up. I'm trying to figure out if that might be true, but there's not enough information to really know at this point.

Not sure what F2P will bring, but with issue 20.5 and the emp and astral merit option to buy purple or pvp recipes it maybe alot cheaper to get hold of these Very Rare in the future.

There was mention of a new "enhancement-unslotter" or basically a revamped, a la carte (shudders at expression) version of the current respec going in I21. Therefore I suspect an interesting range of market effects to the game, after all look at the local effects freespecs do - or even Powerset changes/Power changes.

Fury

We'll have to wait and see, but the intent seems to be to alter the game for current paying customers as little as possible, to enhance it rather than cause new problems. Given their track record, I don't think purple or PVP recipes are suddenly going to be cheap or easy to purchase via alternative methods. I'd think they'd want to balance any new avenues of IO recipe purchases to be more or less in line with merit and a-merit pricing. And if the number of paying (VIP) customers remains relatively stable, then I don't see the market vanishing overnight.

But we'll have to see what real money can get you in this brave new world of theirs.

Personally, I think they will be selling IO's. This whole business model change is about making more revenue. If they can sell the IO's for revenue, they will. Thus, I would assume Auction house pricing would go down. Have to wait and see though.

^^ Matches my thinking as well. We know that they (dev team) are keen on data mining almost everything in this game. I'm sure they've done a fair amount of datamining and determined that rare/Purple IO's to have some of the highest perceived value in the game when looking at where players spend their in-game money. No way are they going to pass up a chance to exploit this in their favor. Thus, they become the "real" marketeers in the game.

Having also played Guild Wars, I'm also wondering if we'll see the new Freedom model take on powerleveling since that also has exhibited a fairly high value to the player community. For example, possibly letting you buy "level tokens" that let you buy levels rather than earn them. GW did something similar for PVP, making the gear the differentiation between those that played their levels versus those that bought them.

I think they'll let you buy a Winter Lord to stick inside your Fire Farm.

I have been quietly buying up (well until now.. but only to those that read this post) some out of favor items. I have a lot of pent up cash in my email and parked toons and figure with this new expansion it seems to me to be a golden opportunity. Only time will tell and if it fails... blah its only play money