Inf Supply: Idle Speculation

It was a comment on the futility of your approach rather than the validity of the point.

It maintains a reliable supply for people that can afford the sale prices by removing the drain caused by people that can't afford the higher floor.

In absolute terms increasing the floor of an item from 5k to 10k while reducing the ceiling from 200k to 150k can be considered an obvious improvement. Looked at as a percentage you've halved the purchasing power of patient people with low incomes while increasing that of impatient rich people by 25%.

I don't know anyone here who's ever said you can't mess with low supply items- that was, after all, my primary argument for merging the markets. Villains were getting hosed not just by the relative feebleness of their market, but by savvy operators who were using that low supply to jack up already high prices even further.

My *only* success with "cornering" a common salvage was red side, back in the day with ancient bones. And even there, once people noticed someone was paying a decent price they stopped vendoring or deleting their bones and supply went through the roof. Within a few days of my walking away it was back to its original feast or famine state- very low supply, with people either paying 5 inf for a bone or paying 500k for one.

In a healthy market (i/e blue side, or the merged market) these things tend to take care of themselves & such "manipulations" are short lived. Yeah you can make a ton of inf off them, but the horizon is usually closer than you think.

A more elegant way of putting my rather clumsy point.

And another benefit, ignored by the OMG HIGH PRICES ARE TEH DEBIL crowd: raising the price floor benefits sellers. instead of getting a handful of inf for their junk, or just not bothering to list it at all, they get a decent price.

For anyone with the ability to pay the marked-up prices flippers have broadly the same functionality as vendors. For those without that ability they're vendors when selling and the embodiment of all that is selfish and evil when buying.

I freely admit to holding both viewpoints; including when I'm cursing myself out while trying to buy something on one character that I'm making a profit off on another.

I wonder if people's perspectives get skewed by playstyle, too. If you're the kind of player who scorches up through the levels on new characters, sets them out, then fairly quickly stops playing them and moves on, then you have a much closer ratio of inf spent:inf gained when you compare selling and buying on that alt. On the other if, like me, you mostly play the same handful of characters for years and very rarely respec, then the ratio is vastly weighted in favour of the amount made from selling.

I deny that any player availing themselves of the market would be unable to afford whatever salvage they wanted at the 'going rate' these days.
Let's remember that those "ridiculous" prices benefit them when selling.

And there are so very many alternative ways to get your junk now, either by spinning inf out of thin air (I made something over half a billion selling the unwanted ATOs from 30 or so Super Packs) or just buying it more or less directly (tickets, merits, etc).

that's what Gleemail is for! =D

Even just playing more or less straight up, you'll make a relative fortune JUST selling drops. The thread is probably long gone, but for a while I was tracking the earnings of my concept/RP stalker Mope, who was playing through the game 'normally' in a way that pretty much minimized his chance to get drops- stealthing everything possible, avoiding combat other than eliminating absolutely necessary targets, etc.

(actually wait, IT'S STILL THERE! Nice! Looks like he had 50m or so at level 30. That Numina's mentioned eventually sold for 500m sometime during my hiatus, which really throws off his earning curve....but anyway, 50m at level 30 is a nice chunk of change).


Of course teaming (which I don't do much of) would mess things up, both by increasing your leveling speed and 'leeching' your drops (dang teammates!).

Even so, buying 'cheap' stuff like salvage shouldn't be an practical issue, more of a mental one ("OMG THIS COMMON JUNK SHOULDN'T BE SO MUCH, I REFUSE TO PAY!")

I wasn't aware the conversation was limited to salvage - I've never considered it to be high enough profit to warrant the slots. On the other hand add a mil to every set recipe in a build and you've likely increased the cost by 50-70 mil. You are also unlikely to have taken any benefit from these prices during the 1-50 journey since there's almost no market activity for a good 95%+ of drops below their level caps.

Once you've got a 50 you like playing, or understand the market well enough to have an effectively unlimited income then well...

Whenever I refer to 'flipping' it's in the context of a relatively high volume, high turnover item. Usually salvage, but also stuff like inspirations, generic IOs...basically anything where there's enough flow & price variation to make it profitable to recirculate junk.

And I've always had great success selling 'off level' IOs- in fact some of my more profitable, low maintinance schemes over the years have involved off-level recipes.

Turnover is slower, but profits are higher- just right for a certain type of character that I don't log in all that often.

Wow, gotta be 10 times by now that you or someone else has made a stupid comment along these lines. Flipping increases the lowest price for an item while simultaneously lowering the highest price; i.e. it narrows the price range.

Technically it lowers the highest price someone must pay for an item. An awful lot of profit comes from people not being aware of this and continuing to pay the old high price anyway.

You can give a horse cheaper water but you can't stop it throwing a tenner on the counter and telling you to keep the change.

It's like he's color blind, but instead of not seeing red he can't see clear statements of fact.

'painting the tape' only works when people don't care about the price, otherwise they bid less.

Actually I'd say most of the market profits in the game come from people who don't care about how much play money they throw at things. It'd be different if the stuff we buy had any gravity, but it's all just funtime game treats. Or if making inf took any sort of real effort, but it doesn't.

In a game where people hurl fistfuls of Monopoly money at each other because drifts of the stuff line every street with more falling all the time, opportunity abounds.

I don't know if I mentioned this or not in this thread, Nethergoat, but look at the prices on Maelstrom's Pistol. And you need TWO of those to properly costume out a dual pistols character. . . it's like the old days when people would hang out at Wents and change their wings every 30 seconds to show that they could afford to spend hundreds of millions on them.

True enough. I just have a run with posi triples stuck in my head, was buy/crafting for 15 mil, putting them up in the mid 30s and over the course of a couple of months didn't sell anything for under 50. Of course anyone that cared about the price wouldn't have been buying the crafted IO since the margin was already fairly obscene.

I hadn't seen them mentioned here, but I did run across a listing while digging through the market looking for opportunities.

It warmed my heart to the price tag on those babies...glad not *everything* in the game is being given away.

I actually had a brain cramp this morning over some level 20 generic IOs for my elec/traps corr.

Got most of them no problem then ran into a speed bump on a couple of Defenses for my bubble machine.
Doubled the 'last 5' on my first bid, no dice.
Went 600k on my next bid, no dice.
Actually paused and thought WTH I can craft these for, like 30k! before coming to my senses and picking them up for a cool million each.

I mean, this is on a character who has a 150m bankroll at level 17 so what do I care? I have 10 minutes to gear up and run a mission while my son's eating breakfast, I'm not going to spend 5 of it messing around crafting a couple of IOs that are "overpriced".

Some fellow already posted a good one in this very thread, lemme find it. Ah, yes...
If the new price is between 15 and 20, it is lower than 20.
Unrelatedly,
I have on occasion bought recipes for generic IOs at far above what it would cost to buy them from the invention table I'd have to use to craft anyway. >.>

If I'm buying the finished enhancement though, yeah, a million inf to save a trip to the university is money well spent.

Wheres my monocle and tea cup, I know I left them here somewhere ...

The platinum framed monocle with a big diamond for the lense, which I only pretend to look through cause I cant see crap through it anyways. The solid platinum cup and saucer completely overlaid with diamonds, even on the inside of the cup, and which I can't drink tea out of because it tastes like crap from the glue I used to stick all the diamonds in there ... I really should have had it professionally done, but I was excited and in a hurry. Dont even get me started on the tuxedo made of real gold, done in finely woven wires, which weighs a frickin' ton and chafes like you would NOT believe !!!

But yea I make a bit of influence on the market

The maximized profits occur in this scenario. You dont have to compete much if you dont want to. You compete some, but only enough to profit.

I personally like to hit and run as often as anything. However there have been a number of items over these last few years where I was the only manipulator. In that case theres no need to leave. I've sat solo on a number of items for weeks to months at a time. That is the sweet spot.

Correct. That is the part I like to call savvy. There are a lot of factors and ways to game an item. You can fight with competition to a certain extent. This is some of where Nethers price ceiling mechanic can come in. However it can be surmounted with the right conditions. Thought - what do you think happens when your competition realizes he's no longer profiting (hint - he leaves the item). What happens when you're alone again in that item (hint - back to full profit). During competition, profits go down. Competition is not constant. My experience is that once people see their item collapse they cut losses at some point. Most do this fairly quickly. How often have some of you done this ? I have in fact been willing to go into loss a couple of times to chase out the competition. Overall profit does come again when you are the last manipulator standing. I dont prefer going into loss. However a willingness to do it will take you through to new profits more often than not. With some items how deep your pockets are and how much you are willing to put into play can mean everything.

Profit is profit. Manipulation has occurred I have influenced a result in my favor.

So in fact with the above post have just fully and I mean FULLY agreed with me - why in world are you still saying i'm wrong ?!? I mean are you even reading what i'm posting ? ROFL, dude thats insane of you. Fail. I mean take that a step further and you are fully agreeing with A_F in that post as well. You have officially 100% contradicted yourself. Well done.

And behold again you are FULLY agreeing with me. ROFL.

You really just do not get this definition thing do you. I have given you a dictionary definition and provided a real example of it. You are using a definition based on a different meaning. I have not seen you define yours. Yet you still try and say the DICTIONARY definition is wrong ?!?

You have failed.

Here you are demonstrating your use of a broad ranging term that applies to much farther ranging areas and applications, than you have narrowly applied to it. You are destroying your ability to effectively debate a topic. You are confusing others and creating a debate over nothing more than your narrowly conceived ideas. More fail.

This is real head scratching. Since the "story" was as fully relevant to the discussion as you can get. Yet, you are trying to say it is not relevant ? I mean have you even taken the time to really understand what I'm saying ? That you essentially agree with everything I'm saying, but somehow are trying to say you are not ?!? ROFL.

And again you have failed.


Totally understandable. I am making simple and direct explanations with accurate examples, but they are still beyond your grasp. From your challenged standpoint it is obviously best to run and hide from the bad mans logic that is too glaringly obviously true to counter? ROFL.

And that is the summation of fail. You have fully succeeded in your failure. Luckily I'm on ignore now or else your ego would probably explode and you'd cancel your sub. Just wow, lol.

Two comments: 1) From the perspective of raising prices, there has been a price increase correct ? 2) The lowering of the highest price is ONLY valid if you have competition in an item. There are times when you dont. When you dont have immediate competition, this point is invalid. When competition is introduced, see above.

Do you not understand that you are saying first and foremost that there is an increase in price ? You are saying this. You are agreeing with the concept of a price increase. Saying the cap is lower, does NOT negate the fact that the floor has INCREASED. Nor does your comment account for the times of manipulation when YOU HAVE NO COMPETITORS in an item and will therefore NOT have a drop in the price ceiling (in fact it can go higher). See above.

Again you have failed.

Manipulation for profit is still manipulation for profit.

Again this is a "closed" economy in a GAME world. A number of the real world marketing factors which are espoused here on the forum which would hinder manipulation are simply not present and/or not even a factor in what happens on the market. This needs to be remembered before you try and apply real world mechanics to the game and say, "hey thats how it works".

GameMaster, a poster who had very little presence on this subforum but who was pretty well-known among broader forum regulars are the time as a rather intelligent person came here and pretty much posted a step-by-step breakdown of his experience manipulating prices. He sucked up supply, drove up the price, watched the market react, and sold his hoovered up supply. He discussed how profit-per-item changed through the course of the run, prior failed attempts, and how many times he failed before succeeding. He drew broad conclusions about conditions he reckoned most strongly affected likelihood of success in his approach.

This was something like 6-12 months after the market appeared in the game.

Most people posting in this thread spoke up in that thread, and none should therefore be claiming that manipulation doesn't happen or can't produce a profit. I have referred to that thread by GM in past discussions about this topic. All the argument appears, in fact, to be about how pervasive this activity is in practice, which spans some combination of how many items are being affected simultaneously, how often any items are affected, and for how long when they are affected.

I wish the forum had some sort of 'hall of fame' exception for primary reference threads like that one so they could persist through the ages.

As is often the case, there is the strict semantic correctness of things being said, and then there is what people mean.

Most likely, Nethergoat is making a distinction between the price floor, which is the minimum price someone could possibly pay in a given time frame, and "the price people pay" for the item, which spans a range of prices and is usually considered to be somewhere in between the floor and the highest price anyone paid in that timeframe. The latter is clearly not the price floor, or there would be no sales at any other prices, including the higher ones flippers look for as indication of a niche they can jump into.

Yes, the price floor went up. Anyone who wanted to pay the absolute minimum for that item in that timeframe had to pay more. People who were willing to pay more, who clearly existed even before the flipper came into the picture, might or might have to pay more with the flipper in the picture, depending on how high those bids of theirs were relative to where the flipper ends up setting their price.

There is "the price people have to pay" and there's "the price people are willing to pay". My view of the market is that "the price" of goods is the latter of those two. I don't care if the bare minimum price goes up - I only care if the price I'm willing to pay goes up. Yes, when I buy stuff, I do often start budding under what I am willing to pay, to see if I can hit a bargain. If I can't, I bid upwards until I hit what am willing to pay. Then I usually back off my bid some and leave it sit.

Of course, if the price you are willing to pay is at or below the floor, you care about the floor going up. But such buyers already had a problem, IMO, because that price was not necessarily ever going to get them the purchase. Other people were already outbidding them.

So most of the people who say "flipping doesn't raise the price" are talking about a notion of "the price" that represents an average of the low and high prices over some time window. In that model of the market, the perfect flipper collapses the price to that price and does not change it.

The notion of such a price is not perfect, but does have some merit, because prices do tend to hover near certain values. There are long-term and short-term trends in such values, where long-term and short-term tend to relate to the rate at which that good is supplied to the market. (Low supply, rare items tend to have longer price cycle trends than ones with very high supply rates). Short-term trends are the ones that tend to react to "painting the tape", for example. Sometimes short term trends turn into long-term ones, sometimes for reasons that seem clear, and sometimes for ones that are not.