Andreah

I run at 4k without scaling, and the rectangular blank areas that try to create the letterboxing don't cover all the way from left to right. They stop about 3/4 the way across, and on the far right hand side of the screen, I can see the full height of the rendered scene. The fakeness is pretty dumb, and ought to be removed. I'll go further, I'd prefer to have a global setting to disable all cutscenes, and just blast the text they provide into my npc chat tab in case I want to read it.

Maybe it's moved since I last checked -- it's been a few weeks since I've dabbled in it. But I was routinely buying at below 350k, and selling at 450k or more. Not huge amounts, but enough that it would be worthwhile for a starter.

I'll disagree back. 🙂 A good starter market should be a bit more work and less lucrative - that's the incentive to move on once you've learned from it. On the other hand, it can make a 20% profit per trade, on less then a million starting inf; and not by buying at 380 and selling at 420, no. I recommend new people bid pretty low, and let those bids sit overnights. They learn that even a market with a lot of volume can swing pretty far in a day. Then they learn how to set sell prices to get a fair profit after fees, and then to balance their buy and sell prices to prevent building up unsold inventory. They do this for a few days or maybe a week or three, and then they've outgrown it, have a stash of inf to play with, and want to move up. In the mean time, a better floor's been set on the rare salvage market than would have been present otherwise.

No change needed. There are tricks and techniques for handling aggro, and some actual teamwork can really make it shine. Someone had written up a very nice guide to how aggro work, in detail, and how it can affect your group tactics. Sadly, I can't find it at the moment. However, what I can say is your main tank is probably not the only character on your team that can handle aggro, and passing it around will let you do amazing fun things.

I did try to create a price floor on rare salvage once. Someone was saying in general chat that they had posted the first piece of rare salvage they got as a drop, all excited and hoping for the 500k windfall to pay for their enhancements, and then got stuck with a 10k sell. Chat helped explain how the market works and how posting at 1 usually is fine, but can have some bumps like that, and I think someone emails the person a little cash to help them get started -- our community is great like that. And then I put in a bunch of bids at some low number I thought would at least make sure anyone posting at 1 got some not unreasonable amount for it ... 250k, I think? Maybe 350? I don't remember the details. The problem was the volume was too high for me to keep up with (I supposed I could have but it was a pain and not worth the time), since I was only buffering the inventory in my character salvage inventory space. I quit doing that after a week or so, but I started recommending to my friends and SG's to flip rare salvage on the lower end. It's a good beginner marketeer's market.

I have purposefully bought things a bit higher than they would sell at, to intentionally reset the history list. A lot of players seem to bid whatever they see in the history, and some will list there too; and changing what the history shows them can have an effect on their buying and selling decisions. Results have been mixed and I doubt it would work at all on high volume items with well-known price points

The important thing was you were there, made a notable impact, and have fond memories of it today.

In television, the earliest series I can remember doing long, interconnected arcs, other than soap operas, was Hill Street Blues.

Workload is the usual reason many market schemes don't scale well. Now imagine if you could post stacks of 100's, or 1000's, or even millions of an item in the auction? Suddenly people would be trying to corner the common salvage market. And might succeed, too. As they say, you can make more money trading wheat than gold, but not one grain at a time.

I think I did that there too, but only for a few hours -- I think a lot of players tried it, it was almost a rite of passage for new marketeers. I remember losing money on the effort though. It would take deep pockets, a lot of marketing slots, and constant attention from me to keep ahead of it, and I just couldn't keep it up. I've tried short term experiments on HC to corner markets, and it's harder; possibly due to the greater overall market/game literacy here and market bucketing and seeding. I've not looked far into the inspiration market. They're hard to store in quantity. It might be possible to do on the more expensive higher-end ones, and even though I buy a few of those from time to time, I haven't seen anything suspicious in those markets. I so see the prices of EoE's ripple before and after scheduled Hami raids now and then. But manipulation there might be hard, since most Hami raids can get more than enough on the spot and not need to go buying them off the /ah.

I don't know if there's a guide per se, but some of the threads here will give you some good overviews. And we're friendly, and will answer questions and offer advice.

Market manipulation puts the "E" in Ebil Marketeering. This is not a how-to guide, but I am curious about what people have seen, experienced, or perpetrated; either here on HC or back on Live. I also want to draw the distinction between manipulation within the game rules, and any abuses or exploits which violate the code of conduct specifically or in spirit. If you believe someone is breaking the code of conduct report it through proper channels, please don't bring it up here. It might even be hard to define "manipulation". I'd leave ordinary buy/relist-higher flipping/speculation out; because it's not really trying to create a new buy/sell price spread, but rather make money through it, and there is arguably a service being performed this way -- economization of sellers and buyers' market slots, rationalizing listed volume, and stabilizing prices. To me, manipulation is not just finding a great niche to make money in; it has the deliberate intent to create one. It doesn't have to be malicious; this is after all, just a game. So, with those out of the way, what kinds of Wentworth's/ Black Market manipulations have you seen/experienced/etc.? My awkward wording is so that I'm not asking people to confess, only generally describe and discuss. 🙂 Have you ever seen/etc a large-scale manipulation? Have you ever seen/etc an attempt to hoard supply of an item to drive prices up? Have you ever seen/etc an attempt to crash a niche in advance of buying on a larger scale? Have you ever seen/etc more than one person conspire to corner a market niche? Have you ever seen/etc resetting of the price history on an item to look more favorable? Have you ever seen/etc Market-PvP, where one player is contending over a market niche with another? Have you ever seen opportunities to manipulate the market? (As a kind and good soul, of course you did not.) What limits on these naturally occur? Do you feel those to attempt to manipulate markets make money through it, or lose their shirts? I think the classic real-world case of this is "Silver Thursday"; March 27, 1980; which I encourage everyone to look up; there's a short and easy to read Wikipedia article about it. There's others, I'm sure. If you have an interesting experience in-game, please explain.

I'm assuming even though the time is listed in "EST" the event is intended to be at 8pm EDT, since most all of the US is observing Daylights Savings now? This might seem a technicality, but if players from outside the US use a time converter, it will probably give them the wrong time, and they'll be late by an hour.

/bind <key> "powexec_name Fold Space$$inspexec_name Ultimate" I actually use this on my tanker. I run on Ultimates almost constantly on them, and it's convenient to tie them to when I want to do a Fold. Ultimates help in many ways, not just for fold space, and a perk of being wealthy is I can afford it. I think most people could, once they're deep in end game and playing rewarding content frequently. An ultimate costs, reasonably, about 750K on the Auction. (You can also buy them with your excess Threads). They last for three minutes, which resolves to 250k per minute, or 15 Million per hour. That's not much for being a full +1 level shift over and above your normal level shift almost all the time. YMMV.

Lol, nice. Sounds like the sort of team that's not fun to be on.

This is a bit off from the full context of Tidge's post, but on most normal teams when I join and find another tank who's either leading or joined before I do, I say right out front in team that I'll be off-tanking and the other tank will be main tank, unless they'd prefer otherwise. Sometimes I have to be extra clear -- "Stay with So-n-so, they're main tank, don't follow me if I bounce around" An off-tank also has the stern responsibility to not make a mess of things. Which they can. Easily.

If this were a second, account wide, stash of such things, it could work. But if it were just a consolidation into a single account wide aggregation, this would be an absolute disaster. The OP may not realize this, but the upper limits on these per character are not very high, and many of us would lose tremendous amounts of all the currency types. The limit on Influence alone is only 2 Billion, and this an extremely difficult thing to change, if not flat out impossible. Anyone with more than 2 Billion inf collectively on the characters on their account would instantly overflow, and lose all the excess unless there were some way to gather it and hold it aside. This adds additional coding complications on top, and as I see it, it's just not practical for the value. Similar issues exist for recipes, salvage, and so on. Many of us use extra characters as spare storage, and until that's solved, I'd oppose this strenuously.

Don't forget Amplifiers -- great to use on higher-level alts that need those last few levels, but they're (relatively) expensive to buy from P2W by then. Or the Experienced temp powers, which also help speed up getting Veteran levels for Emps and Threads.

The features of the auction in CoH are pretty limited compared to real world markets, and the terminology isn't always a good match. I mean, what I wouldn't give to be able to short-sell Winterpacks in November. 😄

I never plan to have to be lucky to get a profit. I work out the averages, and then I count on the law of large numbers for doing what looks right on average in great volume. I'm going to make a profit doing X ten thousand times over or I'm not going to do X at all. When ever you do a conversion, there are only so many things an IO can convert into. Some of those take you closer to what you want to end with, and some don't. For making, say, LoTG's from a certain start, count the number of equally likely outcomes at each step and then ratio the number that yield a success vs a failure. (Or you can have done it enough times and recorded your data well enough to be confident you have a good estimate of the expected number of trials before success) This probability of success is your Bernoulli sequence rate parameter, and you can use that to determine the average number of conversion attempts needed to achieve success .. 1/p, where p is the probability of success. (In the stat literature, Bernoulli sequences are often termed as runs of successes before a failure, so we're backwards of that -- number of failures before a success. ) From this you can estimate your average production cost, and then from that, the cost of the starting input, the cost of the converters, and the market fee you'll need to pay, work out the minimum listing price you can list at for a profit, and compare that to the typical selling prices on the market. Your strategy to choose a price to list at to sell fast may not be at the minimum profitable price, of course, especially in a high volume and competitive market like LotG's, and that's another topic entirely. 🙂 Maybe that's worth a quick discussion anyway. If you have one LotG to sell, you could list it pretty close to the median sell price, and get it to sell overnight, or worst case, a few days. But if you're making 100 of them every day, you need them to sell fast, and you can't list them all that high -- most will still be there tomorrow, and you'll run out of market slots after you make the next batch of 100. You'd need to list them low, so of the, I don't know, ~200 (?) LotG's that sell every day, half of them are yours so you don't build up a big inventory backlog. But the problem with listing 100 LotG's every day at the same price, well below market to achieve volume, is a predator on the market (*humms innocently*) might deliberately put in a series singleton bids to try to figure out who's listing low for volume, and snipe most of them away, only to relist on alts with extra, otherwise unused, auction slots. Or worse, list their 100's of LotG's 1 Inf below yours. Ideally, you want to do this to them -- list your goods 1 inf below where they're trying to sell, and have low enough production costs you can make a profit even if that's the price you sell at. Or at least -Know- that you can, while they're not sure because they didn't do the arithmetic. How do you defend yourself from all this? Watch for patterns in the prices you sell at. List at several price points. Don't get obsessed with number patterns (don't always buy at 5,123,456 or at 10,111,111) Keep your production costs low and your pockets deep, so you can ride out price wars. Be diversified, so you can let go of any one market niche for days or weeks at a time. Have several broad strategies for marketeering -- flipping/arbitrage, crafting, converting, super-packing, and switch between them when it seems appropriate.

I deliberately didn't use the "Flipping" term, because from where I've been, this is buying, fixing up, and reselling for a profit, generally in a rising market. So, if one buys, for example, IO's in certain sets, and then converts them more valuable ones in the same set, or into rarer sets, or uniques, this would be flipping in that sense. To me, buying something only to immediately relist it higher for a profit is speculation (time-arbitrage) -- buying in today's market where prices are relatively low, with the intent of selling in tomorrow's market where prices are relatively high. I'm more likely to call this time-arbitrage, because it's working with the spread over time of the typical seller's impatience to unload, even at a lower price, and the typical buyer's impatience to acquire the asset, even at a higher price. A time-arbitrageur is trading their willingness to hold onto an asset for a while for a cut of the spread, less a second round of market fees.

Are any of you "Pure Marketeers"? A pure marketeer, as I define it here, would be a money-making strategy which did not act as value-added processing, but only as an arbitrage. Buy low, resell high. Not buying inputs, creating a more valuable product, and then selling it. A pure marketeer might also farm, craft recipes, and do conversions, but only on things they acquired via missions and play, not buying purely for that reason. There's probably a better term for it. Back on live, I was what I would consider a pure marketeer, and did pretty well with it. I bought and resold recipes, salvage, purple IOs, and a few other things. I never stockpiled them for later use, only to buffer my sales. Iirc, I could generally get a 30 or 40% margin on things, and there was pretty good volume. I think margins here on HC tend to be slimmer, which is a sign of a more efficient (less inefficient?) market. This may be due to a higher density of knowledgeable players, or just the bucketing of the market at work -- fewer narrow niches dominated by the stochastics. The big advantage I saw was it did not require a lot of in-game activity; once you knew your markets and had things set up, it was a high profit/time and profit/mouse-click activity, So, again, do any of you do this, and how well does it work for you?

I had a news radio station SG back on live on Virtue, but there were only a couple of us in it -- it was "WSPDR World News" or something sort-of like that. If I'd had more a mind for recruiting and leading, it frequently got inquiries. So the idea of having a group like that has a draw. You might also try going to the SG Adminstrator in City Hall and doing a search over group names for the usual suspect "News", "Newspaper", "Reporter", "Radio", etc. If you want to see a SG along a certain theme, and don't find one, then there might be draw to creating one yourself or looking for people who have the same interest to band together to get it going.

I understand where you're coming from, but in a more strict accounting sense, they're worth what you could sell them for, which is pretty consistently 1.8M each. (2M less market fee) When I do analysis of my marketing schemes, I value everything, no matter how cheaply I buy it, at the price I could reasonably expect to sell it at, less fees. Let's say some kind benefactor was gifting me rare salvage, and I was using those to craft recipes to feed up-conversion marketing, I'd still estimate my profit margins counting those at 450k. Because if I can't sell what I'm making for more than the sum of the parts, it's not a real profit.

Right; the point is what you can do with it, the market valuation is what you could reasonably liquidate it for. 🙂