Low level common salvage really high?

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

The only reason? Heavens no, but never underestimate the average persons stupidity. I believe it was said best by George Carlin.

“Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”

I like this sentiment in general. But I'd be curious to see some statistics that show how many toons sell vs. buy (or do both in equal measure). I wouldn't be surprised to find that the vast majority of players use the market merely to buy things, not to sell things. Which, if true, would mean that more players are sensitive to purchase price, than they are to profit potential as a seller. If so, having buyers willing to overpay only helps the minority who sell, and sorta hurts the majority who only use the market to find affordable recipes and salvage (hurts in the sense that sellers may raise their minimum selling prices in an attempt to capitalize on what they think is a trend of overpayment behavior). I think if you really want to help folks out, do what I've seen some forum members do (or say they do), and buy up stacks of stuff that is already kinda expensive (overpay for it if you want to help those sellers out as part of this), and then put them back on the market for 1 inf.

BTW, does anyone know the algorithm used to match up bids with items for sale? I don't think I've ever seen it described.

I'm about 75/25 on putting stuff up for sale on the AH these days. Salvage all goes up, usually at cheapo prices since the salvage markets tend to jump around so much.

Recipes, I've mostly given up on selling 100%. If it's not a huge seller, nor is the crafted IO, it gets vendored. I vendor most of the temp powers recipes as well unless they're the more sought after ones that go for a decent price.

Trying to game the market really isn't my thing since we only get to see the last five sales and nothing else.

My attempts at putting in lowball bids for salvage have been pretty much a failure recently. Some salvage bids have been sitting there for days, taking up AH slots I can't afford to have taken up, so I usually cave and buy for the high prices when I need to craft. Bouncing emails around and using unplayed alts as impromptu storage for recipes I want to craft has gotten old. :P

Every now and then, prices on very common salvage will spike briefly without any apparent rhyme or reason. It generally doesn't stay like that for even a full day, though.

I buy and sell. I don't list any recipes that don't move (they get vendored) but I do list salvage that I'm not using immediately (or within the week) for 5ish. I buy SO's off the market to get rolling, buy recipes cheap etc. I also craft&sell and flip some rarer high price salvage. Various games with the market as side projects to build inf to IO my active characters. It takes surprisingly little inf to IO out a character if you're not looking for the stupid rare stuff on the market... I still want a character in the 2billion club but I'm not aggressive enough with marketeering to pull it off in the short term.

Re. the algorithm: The highest bid gets filled first against the lowest asking price
So, if I'm asking 6 and you bid 5 you won't get it. If I'm asking 6, you bid 7 and someone else bids 8 "at the same time" that someone else will get it. If I'm asking 6, someone else asks 5 and you bid 5, you'll buy that other person's. etc. Equal bids get filled in pseudo-random order.

peterpeter's post on the subject

Fascinating read but he confirms my statement. It is a pseudo-random order. It is not truly random, it is not fifo or lifo. It uses some kind of random number generator to determine the pattern. Their testing just doesn't determine what the seed is for that generator. If the seed is somehow based on the buyer list, given the identical list of buyers you'd get the same pattern of output (ie. same order of "winners").

I don't know how the seed is created or when it is created either that's just a general comment on pseudo-random number generators. If you feed them the same seed and restart they will generate their output in the same order everytime. Good pseudo-random generators will seed off whitenoise from the electronics in the computer and so be much less likely to get the same seed during different runs. I seriously doubt the devs care that much about the random order in small samples to develop or use a really high-end pseudo-random generator.

I was involved in that experiment. Our best guess for the seed was that it related to the names - possibly character names, possibly global. We didn't have someone switch toons to see if they ended up in the same order. We figured it was random enough since the situation we set up (only one item for sale and the exact same group of bidders each time) is not something that would occur in game or that could be taken advantage of.

Well, technically, some people will see "last 5 sales" prices of a million or more on common salvage, assume that those are the result of evil flippers buying things at low prices and reselling them at a million or more, further assume that this means they cannot get any of the items for sale without matching that price, and come to complain on the forums about how flippers make it impossible for them to get things.

So in a way, they *are* expressing hostility towards people who place high bids, they just don't know it.

Yes that is another group but not the ones I was talking about.