Inf Supply: Idle Speculation

I'll just say this. Can you really not see the contradiction between this:

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Originally Posted by Another_Fan Please, if by personal attacks you mean pointing out all the times your "friends" have been wrong a personal attack so be it.

And these?

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Here is a freebie for you, its something I would expect any adult to understand somehow the market forum as a group has missed it or just memory holed it.

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Milady's you are missing a fabulous career in comedy, its just a shame you don't understand how hilarious you can be.

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Really I thought Sargeant Schultz was long gone. I know children play this game but usually they are smart enough not to brag about a lack of self control.

Because I don't think you need to look any further than those sorts of comments to find why people don't want to listen to you. While I understand that it's always tempting to explain widespread opposition as stemming from feeling threatened or similar sorts of coordinated antagonism, I would suggest that it's probably best to look for the simplest answer/common factor. If everyone you talk to says that you come off like a jerk, the answer really might be that you come off like a jerk. Either way, I think I'm done here.

I'm having a really time understanding how one could "make" people pay any price for anything if they aren't willing to. If I think something costs too much, I do something else instead -- either get a cheaper thing, or manufacture it in some way instead of paying that much. I leave a ton of low bids up on stuff I know I'll want, come back a month later, and have stuff.

I don't have a lot more to offer on the original topic; I think the idea of "several different populations that act very differently" is an interesting one. 80/20 in real world money comes from a system where, with a few minor exceptions*, people need money. You might have 80/20 among the "invention people" and 80/20 among the "SO's are fine" people and the groups could differ in wealth by a factor of 10 and size by a factor of 2, or in wealth by a factor of 50 and size by a factor of 10, or whatever.

* Umm, people in monasteries don't? I'm sure there are more examples.

There is a difference in the assertion that "there are people who manipulate the market" and the assertion that "nearly everyone who uses the market casually is the victim of manipulation most of the time". The latter is the form of the claim that so many market doomsayers make, and that's the kind of claim which ensures that I don't think much of the poster's knowledge of the market.

I'm quite happy to try and respond politely to such posters why I don't buy into that viewpoint, and for people I think are new around here, I'm happy to do so without any personal attacks. I'm also happy to say that I and various others around here (many posting in this thread) have managed to convince some such posters that the market isn't some teeming cesspool of Inf exploitation. But some posters come here more interested in pontificating about their views than learning something new, and those posters we rarely convince of different viewpoints. It's when they start making negative judgements about the character of people who disagree with them that any effort on my part at patience with them quickly ends.

Based on my own observations of the market across a large number of items generally (obtained primarily because I tend to be a net seller of goods), I find the price fluctuations of most goods at any given time to lack the fingerprints of manipulation over the longer term. Because of that, I don't accept that most goods are being manipulated most of the time.

When I see signs that someone is manipulating the price of goods upwards, my usual response is to start selling that good. Once upon a time this was not so easy as it is now, but nowadays there are several good ways to produce a specific good. I just make a point of stockpiling fungible goods like merits and converters and using them to spot produce things that are hot sellers. Then I can use the cash earned to buy other things I want later, or even the same item later when the price drops.

I don't always know with certainty that what I'm seeing is intentional manipulation, but there are certainly things that make me suspect it.

Because I do pay attention for things like this, I an fairly sure that at any given time, there are a few things being actively manipulated, and those things are not always the most rare/expensive things on the market. But I also know that skilled manipulation takes devotion, and the amount of devotion required increases with the rate of supply for the thing being manipulated. Players with the kind of devotion needed to persist in manipulation of decently supplied items for more than a few days appear to be rare. Not do the things I take to be manipulation usually die off in such time frames, there are other indicators of how little patience most players have to spend on such activities - if patient players were more common we wouldn't be selling even very expensive things for 2x-10x the list price so often.

I know full well that people who use or care about the market less than I do are more likely to be "caught" by schemes that drive prices up. But I don't consider it likely in general that they are being caught by such schemes all the time across all the things they are likely to want to buy, and so I reject the notion that such "exploitation" is the norm. It happens, but that's not the same thing.

a quick comment on 'tape painting' that occured to me this evening as I was stockpiling salvage for making piles of IOs:

as noted, I overbid shamelessly on average stuff.
when I'm buying in bulk, these bids could give the impression of 'tape painting'.

So, those suspicious strings of high prices aren't necessarily the result of eeebil, sometimes it's just rich, impatient people who don't like fussing with piddly sums.

I think the distinction between "possible" and "omnipresent" is a good and important one.

It's also important to remember that the market generates shortages (and price spikes) all by itself, just through random noise. I saw this when I was buffering common salvage for a year or so- if "Standard price" was 20-30K I had a stack of 10 up at 80 or 90K and a bid for 10 in at 5K. For all midlevel common salvage. This was back, I don't know, the first year or two of the market when people still screamed at the price of Alchemical Silver.

Most of the time I sold a full stack or nothing at all. But occasionally I'd sell 1, or 3, or 6 . I can't tell a full stack sold to manipulators from a full stack sold due to a random shortage, but a half stack is ONLY random shortage.

It happens pretty frequently that the market randomly runs out of stuff.

(PROTIP: With all the AM's going into converters these days, it's happening more often.)

I like the idea that there's only 100 trillion-or-so floating around the market at any given time. It makes me feel like I've had a real effect with my couple hundred billion of burn, and my couple hundred billion of goading (err... inspiring and supporting) other people into burning inf.

A_F, this type of post is exactly what I am talking about. You've once again made sweeping generalizations, left out intermediate information, and have leapt to unsupported conclusions.

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Originally Posted by Another_Fan But if you like here are the secrets of not being a jerk on the market forum. 1. If someone is upset about dealing with the market first call them entitled

We don't first call them entitled. We first try to get them to explain what the problem is and for those that are willing to listen we give them lots of help. There are guides at the top of the forum, we give advice, answer questions, and are generally helpful.

Those that really want to learn how to make influence on the market leave happy and frequently come back and tell us how they used those tips to go on and earn all the rewards they wanted to complete the build for their character, some even come back after that with photos of entering the billion influence club.

Those that come here looking for a fight and refuse to listen to reason, naturally put us on the defensive, there is only so much venomous bile that most people can stomach before they respond in kind.

Those that don't want to put forth the (quite minimal) effort required to earn rewards are the very definition of entitled and it is an apt title to give them.

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2. If someone is complainins about manipulation assert that it never happens then go to 1

Here you extrapolate from zero to infinity and you assign blame to the blameless.

We've done experiments along this line. Except in the cases of items that have too little availability, manipulation is difficult, if not impossible to sustain. Merging the markets increased global availability and further reduced the ability to manipulate. There is no doubt that manipulation occurs but it is not sustained nor is it a global phenomenon that occurs in every facet of the market. It is an infrequent occurrence that might affect one or 2 items for a short period of time.

Blaming the people that frequent this forum for manipulation is rather like blaming us for slavery. None of us were alive when it occurred. What exactly did you want us to do about it? Apologize from something we had no hand in? Accept guilt for an action we did not take? You frequent this forum. Should we blame you for the results of manipulation?

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3. Never take the position there are problems with the market

As opposed to taking the position that all the market is, is one gigantic problem, all the time since release? Really A_F?

Rarely in life is there something that has absolutely no problems. The few problems with the markets are minor and tools exist that let players work around them. A bit of education is usually all it takes to overcome them.

I suppose we could cut the whiners meat for them and spoon feed them while we are at it but I wouldn't want to enable someone's entitlement mentality.

I'm not the kind of person that gives a man a fish. I'm the kind of person that teaches a man how to fish so he can feed himself.

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4. The majority is always right no matter how wrong it is

Facts are right, observable phenomena that replicate or reoccur are right, tested and proven theories are right (unless of course further testing proves they aren't).

Leaving out data that does not fit your theory is not right. Assuming that an outlier is the norm is not right. Jumping to conclusions on little to no data is not right. Conspiracy theories are rarely correct. It doesn't matter if the majority or the minority believes something. Facts are what make something right.

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5. Bonus points if you advocate schemes for making inf that are both time consuming and low profit.

I assume that is yet another barb thrown my way. Yes I craft common IOs. Yes, I sell common IOs. Yes, I've made almost 4 billion in profit selling common IOs since I9. No, its not time consuming. I put in a bid for salvage before I log off for the day. The next day I collect all my salvage, drop my portable crafting table, craft common IOs, list them for more than it costs me to make them and less than it costs someone else to make them for themselves, I put more salvage bids in and go run a TF or missions, an hour or so later when I am done playing I come back to the market (or just use /auctionhouse) collect my profit and the next batch of salvage and repeat.

40ish IOs a day at an average profit of 55,000 per IO is all it takes to have hit 4 billion profit in the 5 years since I9, except I didn't craft commons every day and each IO brought in more than 55,000 profit.

What you call a scheme I call a service to those too lazy to memorize recipes for themselves. or those that think it takes too much time to craft, or those that don't want to be bothered traveling to a crafting table. On the days I craft common IOs it takes about 5 minutes total and now that I have /auctionhouse I can use all the time that is wasted while a team is forming or teammates are gathering, marketeering and no one the wiser for it.

I still craft and sell high ticket items. I just have one crafter dedicated to creating mid level common IOs. Any time I am consuming is time that I am logged off or time that I am playing the game. Best of both worlds for me. I look at that 4 extra billion, that you are sneering at, as gravy.

In a global channel I hang out in, I once brought up how crazy I thought people were who paid like 2-5x what it costs to craft something for the crafted item. A couple of the regulars spoke up immediately and were like "I'm one of those people." These are/were competent players and seemingly competent people in general, but they readily described themselves as having more money than patience. These weren't all people swimming in pools of gold a-la Scrooge McDuck, either - several were the kind of player who strips older characters to move IOs around. They knew they could get more mileage out of more careful spending, but couldn't be bothered to do it.