Gremlin

This doesn't work. If you try to buy a significant proportion of something you'll push the price up because you have to out-bid everyone else. As soon as you stop stop buying the price will rapidly return to normal because the influx of new items won't have stopped. You're now holding a load of stock that cost more than the current price. What do you do with it? If you put it up for sale at an unusually high price then it won't sell. People will just pay the usual rate. If you sell it at a low price you'll lose inf on every sale and you'll push the price down for a while. The only thing you can do without going broke is to turn the items you bought into something more valuable and sell it at a profit. That'll stop you going bust but it won't have manipulated the price. At this point you're not manipulating the market, you're just trading.

Ironically, you've got this the wrong way round. In the real world, artificially high prices can only be created by a monopoly supplier or a cartel. In the latter case, the cartel acts as the monopoly. A monopoly can only continue if nobody else can create substitute goods, if the law forbids substitute goods or if the buyers have been convinced to reject substitutes. These are all possible in the real world. Non-monopolistic suppliers can only offer goods at some price and hope that people will pay it. None of these are possible in the game. Nobody can stop other people from receiving drops. Nobody can stop other people from crafting and converting IOs. Nobody can stop other people from buying and opening Super Packs. Nobody can stop other people from choosing cheaper sets or no sets at all.

Looking at this from the point of view of controlling inflation I'd say "the highest rate that will keep IO prices where they are now". I can't be specific because I don't know what the net influx of inf was before the change and what it is now. From a purely personal point of view, I'm quite happy for my 50s to receive the standard inf rate. I don't want extra inf just because I'm not levelling any more. I've never felt that inf and xp were connected in any way so it seems natural that when I finish levelling the XP stops and the inf continues as before. I'm not trying to argue that this is how it should be. I'm just expressing a personal preference.

Nobody really "sets" prices at all. Prices are the average result of the behaviour of the whole community. Those players who sell lots of recipes drive the prices of the recipes down. Farmers and other people who don't wish to craft do this a lot. People who buy IOs at the going rate drive the price of the IOs up. The more inf they have the higher the prices go. Farmers and other people who don't wish to craft do this a lot. People who craft IOs and/or convert them drive up the prices of recipes and drive down the prices of IOs. Marketeers and other people who like crafting do this a lot. Most people do a mix of all of these things depending on personal taste and whatever they feel like doing right now. To resort to stereotypes, farmers feed recipes into the market which drive inflation down, they create lots of inf which drives inflation up. Marketeers convert unwanted recipes into desirable IOs which makes farmers better off by making recipes more valuable and IOs cheaper. So, everybody and nobody sets prices. The devs have make it clear that they understand all this and they made this change explicitly to curb inflation by shifting the ratio of new recipes to new inf. They've also made it abundantly clear that they support all play styles. (I know this has been said a dozen times. I'm just recapping for those who haven't read this rather epic thread.)

I'm not aware of any exploits but if they exist I'd be delighted for the devs to fix them. I'd be doubly delighted if you're talking about the Last 5 bug.

I'm happy to share trading strategies and techniques. e.g. rare roulette, opening packs. I don't want to announce the exact niches that I'm working at the moment though. The reason is that competition between traders drives down profit margins. If I tell everyone that I'm doing very nicely from crafting Befuddling Aura End/Confuse then there's a good chance that a couple of people will start doing the same thing. Then the profits fall off, I'll have to find a new niche and they'll think I was exaggerating. 🙂

What does HOB stand for?

If you disagree then I've almost certainly dropped the ball on this one. I withdraw my comment.

Sellers specify the minimum price that they're prepared to accept. Nobody can pay less than that. Consequently, it's difficult to say that a low price is "unfair" in any way. There's no automated data collection or long term stats for the market. It's difficult to create a price list by hand because prices change all the time. They're affected by random noise, flavour of the month builds, releases, inflation etc. You can't guarantee that you'll never over bid but you can bid low on average. A very rough rule of thumb is that IOs occasionally sell for half the average price and often sell for 3/4 of the average. Prices are usually about 25% higher at the weekend and then drop on Monday and Tuesday. The Ebil Marketeer's solution is to make so much money by trading that you no longer need to worry about the prices of things you actually slot. 🙂

I don't think so. Several farmers have said they do the same thing for the same reason. One minor variant is to set a minimum price for high value recipes just to avoid low-ball bids. In theory, you might be able to work out the optimal selling price for everything. Perhaps that would be the highest price that would sell before your next session. In practice, there are far too many recipes to keep track of. FWIW, the general opinion in the marketeer community is that listing all your recipes for 1 will get you most of the optimum value anyway. I'd guess around 90%. You might be able to double the value of your drops by crafting and converting. That would significantly cut down on your farming time though and would also require a huge amount of knowledge. In short, if you prefer farming to marketing then your current approach makes perfect sense to me.

I don't think we can emphasise this enough. People tend to post highly optimised builds. Builds that are highly optimised for one thing are quite likely to be unsuitable for general content. This is clearly true with farm builds but a lot of other builds I've seen are just as odd. I looked at a few builds for my brute and discovered that it was harder to find out what was wrong with them than it was to just do my own build. Now I just use other peoples' for inspiration. e.g. hey look, you can have high def on a blaster, or perma hasten is possible but rarely worth it etc IMO If you pick the powers that you fancy then your build is good to go. Slapping just about any set on the powers you use most often will give 90% of the benefit from sets. Mini-maxing set bonuses gives you toon a little extra zing but if you team a lot it won't be noticeable and even solo it usually just means turning the difficulty up a notch. If you want an optimised build but find it all a bit overwhelming then you can create a build with the powers you want, pick some reasonable looking sets and then ask the folks in the correct archetype forum to tune it for you. Be sure to tell them what's important to you. e.g. "I usually team and I like to exemp mid-level content."

Someone was buying Enhancement Catalysts today. They bid 30 mm instead of 3 million. That's not too bad... but they bought a stack of 10 from me. Ouch! I only had 10 for sale so it's possible they bought another stack or two from someone else. Shudder.

Oh yes please.

Yep. I blubbed at that point.

So we're proposing a new badge to be given to whoever triggers the largest torch waving mob of badgers? That could work. 🙂

I don't buy converters very often so I'm not familiar with the price. I sell a few from time to time and I'm used to seeing the price in the 82 to 90k range. I don't think I've ever seen them at 75k. Is that price common?

Yay! Welcome back.

I don't think of marketeer, farmer, role player, badger etc as people; I think of them as hats. We're badgers when we're hunting for badges, marketeers when we're trading and farmers when we're farming. At lot of us have favourite hats but most of us do at least a bit of everything.

Have you seen any data about this? I'd love to see some concrete numbers.

I also believe it's far too early to tell. I don't think we'll see the results of the change for 3 to 6 months. This is a wild guess though. The effect of inflation on prices is similar to the effect of the accelerator (gas) pedal on the speed of a car. All we know for certain is that accelerator was flat on the floor and now it's not. Maybe we're going to slow down, maybe we're going to keep cruising at the same speed, maybe we're going to keep getting faster we don't really know. All we know is that we're not accelerating as much as we were. We may never see prices fall.

That's what I thought as well. FWIW I think the numbers quoted for inf per minute from farming are usually based on dividing the inf dropped by mobs by the time taken to clear the map. They don't include drops or the time taken to process and sell drops. Marketeers tend to measure the total time for a trading session but have to estimate how much inf they make because each trade starts in once session and ends in another so you have to average it out. I've recently been doing some trading where I carefully measure all the time and the inf generated. That's giving figures of around 2 to 3 million per minute.

There's definitely a learning curve but you don't need to invest much effort to get started and you don't need any seed capital. You can start out by buying recipes, crafting them and selling the IOs. The main effort is to learn what the normal price ranges are for the recipe and the IO. I usually check prices a few times over a week to pin those down. If you prefer converting, just find something cheap that you can convert to something more valuable. I've generally found that capital isn't a problem because most of my trades have a 100% markup. Reinvesting my profits is more than enough. I don't think speculation is necessary. I've never done it. I aim to sell what I make in a day or two. Spending 20 minutes a day to make 10 million inf is pretty easy. Scaling that up to 50 million is definitely possible. I'm not sure I could push it to 100 million in 20 minutes but then I've never tried that hard. 🙂 The market forums are very helpful and encouraging to anyone who wants to get into trading. There aren't any trade secrets!

It's not just AVs. All sorts of mobs have a tendency to head for the hills. I've found Crey power tanks particularly annoying lately. It's not just that they're fast; it's that they go a very, very long way before coming back.

Most of my 50s have levelled in duos doing story arcs on single XP. The duo is usually fighting at +1x8 or by level 50. I'd guess these toons have around 600 merits by level 50 and have earned about 50 to 100 mm inf from defeats. Adding in recipe drops I'd be surprised if a toon makes less than 450 mm this way.

I found the same thing. However, I've noticed that my toons seem to get a couple of PvP recipes at low to mid levels. Sadly I haven't kept records so I don't know how common this is. For my limited trading toon, the bulk of her inf has come from a small number of high value recipe drops and merits. Rare salvage and yellow recipes make up the rest. I'd guess that yellow recipes have made up 10-20% of her income to level 25. She isn't going to have a 1 bn inf build by level 50 but it will be a solid mid-range build.