Ebil Sunday #10 - Unstable Tables

[Ura Hero]

Hi diddly ho Ebil Marketeers!

 

Back into playing the market, lightly.  I've been more or less not doing much since before the holidays.  I jump back in and all of my niches are over-run.  Health, defense and resist are way down.  Some folks are being really ebil with the pricing.  Not that I am complaining, there are still plenty of opportunities out there, just a bit harder to find.

 

I've still managed to do about 2B this week without working too hard after spending it all a week or so ago.  Took a few minutes while my son was home this weekend to show him how to work the market, hopefully he will be ebil soon enough.

 

How are your ebil efforts going?  Are you waiting or flooding, or just poking around at it?

[Troyusrex]

Just poking around. I got bored of forging and converting hundreds of enchantments. I’ll go back to it someday, but I needed something new. 
 

Niches abound. You could make a fortune just by buying up things on low volumes during the week and selling on Saturdays, but I don’t do much of that. 
 

I found a couple niches that are working well. One I’ll give away is that Brain Storm salvage has been going for 15,000 or less. Meaning you can get 20 for 300,000, make a very rare salvage from it and sell that for 450K+. That net 450K-(300K+45K to the store)=105K profit for a few clicks. 
 

Lots of similar things around and it’s been interesting to poke around and find some. 

[Ukase]

I haven't been doing too much of any of it - just crafting and converting what drops. But, with an afk farm character on a second account, that's a lot of drops. 
I asked myself -- maybe I should save myself some time and simply invest the time and see if I'd be better off selling the salvage, the recipes and the converters. But then, I do the math in my head, and the crafting, converting...it's just insanely more money. 

I never sell rare salvage from the 41-50 range. I keep it all - most in the reserve vault, and my farmers will withdraw as they need it. 
I never sell purples - unless it was a dedicated day of buying recipes for about 2/3 the crafted value and posting them. I made 250m in about 2 hours on a day..so did it the rest of the day. Craft for 10 minutes, go play a bit, repeat. 

What has gotten my attention is the supply of LotG 7.5% -- has increased. And so has the price. I'm almost 100% certain that one or two people are buying these up, and relisting them for 1.5-2M more. And another one or two people are doing their best to seed the market and list the price at about 7m. 

Clearly - people ARE willing to spend up to 10M on one of these, but there's just enough benevolent marketers that sell them cheaper where the price had stabilized for weeks at about 7m. But the past week has seen them go up to 9m or so. 

In the aftermath of all those candy canes from the Winter event - the blessing of the zephyr's recipes and IOs must be in large supply, as that price seems to have gone from 3-4m to 1-2m...but it fluctuated back up for a day before it went back down again. I have thousands of these useless candy canes, lol. 
 

What I'm keeping my eye on closely are ATO and Winter O prices. I don't want to sell the ones I have, because I know, sooner or later, an alt of mine will want to use them. But I also want to realize some profit from the 400 or so winter packs I bought. It's so tedious and slow opening them, I think I'll still have some NEXT Christmas!

[tidge]

6 hours ago, Ukase said:

I haven't been doing too much of any of it - just crafting and converting what drops. But, with an afk farm character on a second account, that's a lot of drops. 
I asked myself -- maybe I should save myself some time and simply invest the time and see if I'd be better off selling the salvage, the recipes and the converters. But then, I do the math in my head, and the crafting, converting...it's just insanely more money. 

I never sell rare salvage from the 41-50 range. I keep it all - most in the reserve vault, and my farmers will withdraw as they need it. 
I never sell purples - unless it was a dedicated day of buying recipes for about 2/3 the crafted value and posting them. I made 250m in about 2 hours on a day..so did it the rest of the day. Craft for 10 minutes, go play a bit, repeat.

I'm very much of the same attitude (except that my 'farming' is running Dark Astoria arcs for drops). I actually keep the rare (non-PVP) recipe drops turned off, but still collect some for assorted reasons (rewards, day jobs, whatever). This weekend was used to clean out as many of those assorted orange recipes as possible, along with previously horded rare salvage. I'm lazy in my (proto) ebil ways.

 

The hit to the Winter O sets has been annoying, because those used to be ok early stopping points on rare-roulette at all level ranges.

 

The LotG Recharge price hike does feel like market manipulation. Given that this is around a 50% price hike (for 'only' an extra 3M) on a commonly used piece this is probably not so much profit-driven as it is for the lulz.

[Ura Hero]

8 hours ago, Ukase said:

What has gotten my attention is the supply of LotG 7.5% -- has increased. And so has the price. I'm almost 100% certain that one or two people are buying these up, and relisting them for 1.5-2M more. And another one or two people are doing their best to seed the market and list the price at about 7m. 

Clearly - people ARE willing to spend up to 10M on one of these, but there's just enough benevolent marketers that sell them cheaper where the price had stabilized for weeks at about 7m. But the past week has seen them go up to 9m or so. 

I have definitely noticed this as I was marketing this weekend.  The price hovered between 8-10M for LoTG +recharge.   I saw this on a couple of other sets as well, but I didn't write down what they were.  Sets that had no reason to be 6-7M, but were.  Someone is obviously gouging the market on a few things.

 

Dangerous position to take if a group decides to flood.   I did that in WoW many years ago with Netherweave bags.   Had enough gold that I could afford to buy everything and relist at nutty prices.   Made a killing on it till a group got together and flooded me out.    Took me a couple of very tedious months to drop my inventory without losing my shirt.    I learned my lesson.  After that I switched tactics and did the opposite and tried my best to keep prices low by undercutting as much as possible.  Lesser profits, but I made a lot of good will that way except to the people I was undercutting.  Got a lot of hate mail and even a couple of threats.  It's just a game folks.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Ura Hero

[Ukase]

1 hour ago, Ura Hero said:

  Lesser profits, but I made a lot of good will that way except to the people I was undercutting.  Got a lot of hate mail and even a couple of threats.  It's just a game folks.

True enough - but one thing about CoH market is you have no way of definitively knowing who is doing what. Some time back, someone took a screen shot of him listing lotg 7.5% at 6 inf or some ridiculously low price and still getting 6-7m for them. Other than screenshots, we just never know who to curse or bless. 

At this point, the only reason I'm marketing now is for the fun of it and to give it away - when it's my idea. Panhandlers are frowned upon and treated with disdain. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

So far this calendar year, I've been preoccupied with my surgery, so I didn't play at all for awhile and then was restricted to playing one-handed <insert joke here>.  Not much actual play got done, and minimal marketing, but observations abound.

 

Prices on a few IO staples have moved 1-2mm higher since the new year.  You all mention the LotG proc, and I agree that it looks like the actions of one or two people.  What's more interesting to me is that other sellers seem to have pretty good pricing discipline, so there doesn't look like a lot of deep discount underselling.  Underlying demand remains good, and people keep making alts that needs those 7.5%s.

 

Supply in a lot of other IO areas has dried up, and there have been some shortages.  But I separate demand into sophisticated buyers and retail buyers.  Retail buyers are price takers and will bid creep until they get what they want.  Sophisticated buyers will put in bids and wait.  There are entire niches that no one will lift an offer if there are more than ten for sale; they just put in bids and wait.  But the minute there are less than ten, they disappear at full retail price.  I remember one of the brute ATOs that I owned ten of, and they were the only ten available.  Listed ten at 10mm -- nothing for a day.  Took them down and listed one at a time for 16mm.  Sold them all within an hour.  But in general, I don't want to sit around like that.

 

Lots of good profit potential right now.  Some spots (like LotG), I'm not even bothering to craft anymore.  I buy the dumps in bulk, relist them under the seller' ceiling, double my inf.  Anything that has less than 20 of something for sale, and it's a good set, there's some nice potential.  I see a number of places where prices are spiking to 6-10mm.  You may not be able to sell 100 there, but you can certainly sell 5-10 there.

 

Winter-Os and ATOs feel sloppy to me.  There are a lot of buyers of the super packs who are content buying the pack and dumping the contents as is.  As a result, it really depends on when people choose to do that, and I don't monitor that as closely as I used to.  I worked my way out of the majority of my winter packs for 1-2x profit, but I still have about 2000 and I think a lot of people still have a bunch they are sitting on.  

 

PvP are insane right now.  If you are not involved in that segment, you should be.  Not paying much attention to purples, but I've seen some go up to the 30mm range.

 

Rare salvage seems pretty stable right now, and you can make a decent living buying at 400 and selling at 500, but 500k profit per AH slot and an ROI of 12.5% is peanuts.

 

Converters are slightly more expensive.  I've adjusted my bids higher, because, hey, an extra 5k won't kill me and it's annoying to not get filled overnight.  I don't expect prices to spike, but if they do I've got tens of thousands of merits that I have to do SOMETHING with.

 

Happy hunting!

[MunkiLord]

4 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

PvP are insane right now.  If you are not involved in that segment, you should be.  Not paying much attention to purples, but I've seen some go up to the 30mm range.

They are! Excluding the procs, I'm buying Panacea and Shield Wall and close to doubling my influence. After crafting and fees it might be closer to 50% profit. But still, they move fast.

 

I've also been moving my main market toon and working on all the day job badges. Currently I'm sitting in a PvP zone for that badge, and I'm not able to use the market from there. So she's on a break for about three more days. Because zoning each time I log on is apparently out of the question for me.

[EmperorSteele]

ATOs are a bit flooded right now, so I'm holding off on my usual "Buy Super packs and sell shit" strat until supply goes back into the single digits. I'm outfitting a few toons and will have to start seriously marketing or dumping Merits to keep a steady cash flow so I don't go broke!

[0th Power]

I’ve been on a break from marketeering for a while, but I did spend 20 minutes crafting and converting and turned ~2mil in recipes and salvage and about 200 converters into ~250mil. 
 

I have been buying more than selling lately. I end up paying “buy now!” Prices. 

[Troyusrex]

It wasn't my intention to pump-and-dump, but after my post Brain Storm idea prices surged to 25K. So I put the thousands that I bought for 13K or so back on the market for a quick return! 😁

[golstat2003]

Pretty much been doing nothing but converting enh and selling, and building up some old lvl 50s with purples.

Made about 876 million this week which promptly went into purple out 2 toons (one a warshade lol) and a complete build for another.

Edited February 17, 2020 by golstat2003

[DR_Mechano]

So far this week just doing the old converter roulette combined with farming made about 500 million inf casually. Saving up for an absurd build for my Psi/Bio scrapper to match my TW/Bio scrapper. Reason I throw in farming is that every purple recipe is 25-30 million less inf I need to spend. I'm one of these people that will do the basics of market play and farming and then splurg billions back into the market all at once with price being no object.

 

Unless it's things like LotG +Recharge, in which case I just rare roulette into those.

[MunkiLord]

12 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

I'm one of these people that will do the basics of market play and farming and then splurg billions back into the market all at once with price being no object.

This is me too. I'll pay an absurd amount of influence if there is only one of a particular enhancement I want being sold when I'm trying to slot a character. 
 

Edit: to clarify, I'm talking only about the spending part. A majority of my time in game is doing market stuff. 

Edited February 18, 2020 by MunkiLord

[Yomo Kimyata]

37 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

This is me too. I'll pay an absurd amount of influence if there is only one of a particular enhancement I want being sold when I'm trying to slot a character. 
 

Edit: to clarify, I'm talking only about the spending part. A majority of my time in game is doing market stuff. 

Not me.  I am the person who puts in bids for 10-50 at the LOB.  I rarely need something right now, mainly because I thought about it five levels ago and it's sitting in my inventory.

 

[MunkiLord]

I usually plan out my build as I farm/doorsit and then buy everything at once when I hit 50. A few weeks ago when I saw Panacea all going for 13-17 million, my first bid was 20 million for each one of them. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

I usually plan out my build as I farm/doorsit and then buy everything at once when I hit 50. A few weeks ago when I saw Panacea all going for 13-17 million, my first bid was 20 million for each one of them. 

thanks!

 

[MunkiLord]

Anytime! I like to spread the wealth.

[Scientist]

I'm one of the ones who bids low and bid creeps for builds, because I have them planned out, and if I get everything for half-ish price it means I only have to spend half as much time marketing.  Part of what I work to make Inf is buying/crafting/converting purples, so if I use a set on a character I replace it with ones I generate that way, so I can always get those from my stockpile in a hurry.  Also, after getting my first couple of 50s, I haven't been on a hurry for others so plenty of time to bid low for things I want.  

[Obus Form]

Finally sold all 100 winter IOs after 5 business days.  ATOs are flooded as are purples.  Going to add the pvp and 7.5% IOs market to my list now

[Obus Form]

Prediction:

 

When electric aff and dark melee changes go live, unslotters will rise higher than 150k each.  Not big money, but I have 99k units, so it's a time to unload the volume thing.

 

Unslotters, catalysts, and enhancement enhancers.