Do the admins/devs also seed "in need" enhancements?

[kelika2]

I refuse to believe that the 6 or 7 characters I had earlier that needed 10-20 enhancements each magically buy them by the next day by other players.  Especially stuff like Decimation/Call to Arms/Basilisk's eye

[kelika2]

Also, I am not complaining.  Crab spiders drastically change when perma hasten is acquired.

[Gulbasaur]

3 hours ago, kelika2 said:

Especially stuff like Decimation/Call to Arms/Basilisk's eye

I usually convert my cheap and cheerful enhancements and things like that turn up fairly frequently and if it sells for more than one million, I shove it on the auction house.

 

While I believe the market is seeded, there are also players who convert enhancements for profit which churns out a lot of medium-tier enhancements. It's a fairly good way of turning reward merits into inf. While some players play the market a bit more carefully, I list almost everything for a million and see what turns up. 

Edited January 5, 2020 by Gulbasaur

[VileTerror]

My spouse has been opening Super Packs and just dropping everything in the market at 1 Inf, earning about 1/3 to 1/2 the value back, buying more Super packs, and rinsing and repeating until broke, then apparently farming back up the Inf to do it all again.  While none of that directly accounts for Decimations, Call to Armses, or Basilisk's Eyes . . . maybe the spirit of giving is contagious and others are doing similarly with Inventions?

[Yomo Kimyata]

13 hours ago, kelika2 said:

I refuse to believe that the 6 or 7 characters I had earlier that needed 10-20 enhancements each magically buy them by the next day by other players.  Especially stuff like Decimation/Call to Arms/Basilisk's eye

As one of the elves who is busy making shoes for you at night, I can tell you it certainly is other players who are making that product for you.  I used to do it for the inf, but now I do it because I simply cannot stand the disorder of an inefficient market.  I have a sickness.  You are welcome!

[boggo2300]

1 hour ago, VileTerror said:

My spouse has been opening Super Packs and just dropping everything in the market at 1 Inf, earning about 1/3 to 1/2 the value back, buying more Super packs, and rinsing and repeating until broke, then apparently farming back up the Inf to do it all again.  While none of that directly accounts for Decimations, Call to Armses, or Basilisk's Eyes . . . maybe the spirit of giving is contagious and others are doing similarly with Inventions?

thats a weird hobby 😄

[SuperPlyx]

As a farmer when I get a full recipe storage,I craft all the yellows,convert them to whatever looks as if it will sell for atleast 1 million and list it. Some nights list around 40 enhancements

[Sakai]

I personally think that somewhere it is set up to unseed the Market by way of fake purchaseds or something. I see no way that actual people buy the amount of crap we dump on the Market. 

[siolfir]

35 minutes ago, Sakai said:

I personally think that somewhere it is set up to unseed the Market by way of fake purchaseds or something. I see no way that actual people buy the amount of crap we dump on the Market. 

The crap enhancements are bought attuned and converted, where they are either used or resold. So even the crap sells.

[Sakai]

True enough. Didn't actually mean crap IOs, was just to lazy to go back and change the verbage. I am simply amazed by the sheer volume of items that people purchase off of me.  Honestly I seem to only deal in the quality items so I am baffled by it all. 

[Shred Monkey]

I dump every recipe and every piece of salvage I get on the market whenever my inventory fills up, so I see this story from the opposite side.  There are usually a handful of what one might call "crap" recipes that don't sell immediately, but everything does eventually sell.  I think the way the converters and attuning system work, there's really no recipe that isn't useful so there's no reason not to list everything and expect it to move.  Therefore, there's also no reason not to expect to find everything on the market, especially if you buy attuned enhancements so levels don't matter.

 

I was suspicious too after coming back that the AH was being "seeded" by the Devs.  But that was before I understood how converters worked and how the salvage pools work.

[Snarky]

Two words. Enhancement converters.  Are there enhancements available in the ‘type’ that you need?  Regular, purple, pvp?  Then buy anything in the right category.  And convert. No need to seed

 

i see an enhancer i want selling in a set. Say Brute ATO. Making numbers up here but roughly iff memory. Needed one of each. Got 3 at 7-8 mil. Then nothing.  Hmmm. Then i realize there is zero or one available. One has 5 avail but are selling at 12-15 mil. NO. I go back to the ones i bought. One has 15 for sale. I but 3 of those at 7-9 mil and convert.  Bam

 

similar when selling. I buy cheap yellow recipes and craft convert sell. Generally shooting for a sale price of 4 mil or more a pop. And that keeps the alt mad populace in procs. And the resources used are useles. Yellow recipes and converters i earned through TF. 
 

no need to seed on a busy server

[Jimmy]

Enhancements aren't seeded, just salvage and super packs!

[Shred Monkey]

Wow.  I'm speechless... I've been gaming and posting on forums for decades and I can't say I've ever seen such a simple straight answer from a Dev on the inner-workings and mechanizations of their manipulation of our world before.   This really is something special we've got.  Thanks!

[Chris24601]

And to put the devs seeding choices into perspective... if you have salvage, super-packs and reward merits you CAN basically get any enhancement you'd ever want eventually for some price (a recipe drop in the same category + seeded salvage + converters and attunement bought for merits = any attuned set IO you'd want; seeded superpacks equal eventually getting an ATO you need; sell the rest).

 

In other words, as long as there's enough salvage and super-packs everything else can be gotten by yourself if you want it enough... or if the playerbase is large enough, others will do the work and you just pay them the Inf for doing it for you.

[Grouchybeast]

20 hours ago, Sakai said:

True enough. Didn't actually mean crap IOs, was just to lazy to go back and change the verbage. I am simply amazed by the sheer volume of items that people purchase off of me.  Honestly I seem to only deal in the quality items so I am baffled by it all. 

Faster levelling means more high-level characters for people to kit out.  On top of that, IOs are, relatively speaking, cheap on HC, and since Attuned IOs are folded in with the rest of the IO pooling on the AH there little reason not to add sets to a character as you level them.

[boggo2300]

9 hours ago, Shred Monkey said:

Wow.  I'm speechless... I've been gaming and posting on forums for decades and I can't say I've ever seen such a simple straight answer from a Dev on the inner-workings and mechanizations of their manipulation of our world before.   This really is something special we've got.  Thanks!

It's @Jimmy there's a deeper game here  #trustnoone

[RikOz]

Speaking seeded salvage, I'm sometimes puzzled by how long it actually takes my purchases to go through when buying a piece of rare salvage. The AH shows that there are around 10 million of that thing "for sale", and maybe a few hundred bidding, so I place my bid and ... come back tomorrow to pick it up because apparently I need to wait for a lottery to determine who gets one of those 10 million Imperviums.

[Mister Mass]

Well, the rare salvage is seeded at 1 million each, so unless you are a really big spender, you aren't bidding for the seeded salvage.  You are bidding for the unseeded salvage, put on the Auction House by players.  And since you can only purchase salvage listed for less than or equal to what you are bidding, it is likely that none of the salvage listed when you bid is available for purchase at your bid price.  But if you wait, plenty of players are usually listing their drops at cheap prices, so your bid finally completes.

[Chris24601]

As I understand it, the auction house program sells the item that is listed for the lowest price to the highest bidder (that is also higher than that price) and then in the order put up for bidding.

 

So say three people put things up in this order; 100(a), 150, 100(b). If three people then bid 200, the first bidder gets 100(a), the second gets 100(b) and the third gets 150.

 

As stated, the seeded salvage is listed at well above the typical going rate for them (ex. the going rate on Everlasting is currently about 400k) so as long as you list the salvage for around the going rate or less, it’ll cycle through pretty quickly (if you absolutely want to sell it now, list it for 1 inf and it’ll sell immediately for the highest current bid... risky for low volume things without many bids, but for rare salvage you’re pretty safe).

Edited January 8, 2020 by Chris24601

[Troo]

pst hey.. What,   you   need   something   specific?  Lemme know, I'll hook you up. (in-game of course)

 

the AH can be a bit buggy in this current version of the game. it's not the player.

few places like the Black Market/Action House where patience or planning can really pay off.

that said, there are big swings in the displayed prices. if someone is in a hurry they may pay a bit more but rarely more than double the average. If a person is patient even just a couple hours they typically save a bit or be able to then adjust their bid.

 

IF there are none or just one for sale and a lot of bids. It may take another channel to acquire that item (merits, convertors, a-'buddy'-like-me, super packs, etc).

[Call Me Awesome]

I've made a few billion inf on Homecoming buying cheap recipes and using converters to get something valuable for the AH.  There's loads of uncommon recipes with hundreds for sale priced at under 1k.  Add in about 2k worth of salvage and the crafting fee, then a few 90k converters and you have something that sells for $2 million or more.  It's a decent return and typically only takes about 20 minutes a day.

 

I found super packs to be a bad investment personally; I'd buy 10-20 of them and not do a lot better than break even on resale of the contents.  It WAS less work than crafting and converting but not as profitable.  Part of that is that many of the things it drops you can't sell in the AH; I've a ton of fairly useless boosters sitting in my mailbox.  If you want the boosters then maybe it's good, but if you're after inf then I'm not impressed.

[Jimmy]

11 hours ago, Chris24601 said:

ex. the going rate on Everlasting is currently about 400k

Just FYI - the AH is cross-shard (this was also the case on live too).

11 hours ago, Troo said:

the AH can be a bit buggy in this current version of the game. it's not the player.

The AH has never worked well, sadly. To say it's poorly made would be putting it mildly 🙂

[Chris24601]

4 hours ago, Jimmy said:

Just FYI - the AH is cross-shard (this was also the case on live too).

Even better; it’s about 400k across the board then for rare salvage with seeded salvage listed at 1 million.

 

Which means as long as the salvage prices we see remain below that 1 million mark then ALL the transactions are actually player-to-player.

 

Thus, if the population stays stable or expands, it may be possible to stop seeding salvage entirely at some point (though a case can be made for continuing it, if only to prevent inflation... which is something I remember from live).

[Mister Mass]

On 1/8/2020 at 11:29 AM, Chris24601 said:

Even better; it’s about 400k across the board then for rare salvage with seeded salvage listed at 1 million.

 

Which means as long as the salvage prices we see remain below that 1 million mark then ALL the transactions are actually player-to-player.

 

Thus, if the population stays stable or expands, it may be possible to stop seeding salvage entirely at some point (though a case can be made for continuing it, if only to prevent inflation... which is something I remember from live).

The seeding of salvage provides several benefits.  First, it guarantees that there is always some of that item for sale, which was a problem for some rare items on Live.  Second, it acts as a breakwater against artificial shortages induced by marketeers.  On Live, marketeers could buy up all of the available salvage of a type & drive up the prices for that salvage for a time, making it difficult/impossible for normal players to purchase what they wanted/needed until the market normalized with the price bubble collapsing.  With salvage seeding, a marketeer would need to buy through a million salvage seeded at artificially high prices in order to have his fun.  While not impossible, this reduces the marketeer's profit incentive & probably would take most of the fun out of the exercise for them. 

 

While these artificially-induced market bubbles never lasted all that long on Live, they did act as a disincentive for AH-wary players to use the system.  I see no reason to end the seeding.  It does no harm & may be doing some good by acting as a guarantee of a supplier of last resort on the AH.  I applaud the HC devs for adding this mechanism to the flawed, but useful, AH.