Why is seeded salvage increasing in price?

[Alpha Man]

Rare salvage has gone from an average of 500 k to creeping into 750 k territory. I don't really play in the market too much. How is it possible that seeded items are increasing in price? 

[Rathulfr]

2 minutes ago, Alpha Man said:

Rare salvage has gone from an average of 500 k to creeping into 750 k territory. I don't really play in the market too much. How is it possible that seeded items are increasing in price? 

That's how markets work, my friend.  As long as someone is willing to pay the higher price, then the goods will sell for that higher price.  If you don't like it, bid lower and wait, like everyone else does.

 

They seeded the market to set the cap on the prices, not the floor.  Rare salvage was seeded at 1M Inf each.  So it can never go over that cap.  The bottom can fluctuate up and down as the market dictates.

 

[Lines]

The salvage is seeded at different values: Rare at 1 million, Uncommon at 100,000 and common at 10,000. (I think. Or something)

 

Anything less than those values is exchange between players and prone to fluctuations.

[Heraclea]

This is why you run AE missions for tickets, so you can ignore the markets.  It was inevitable that the value of inf would decline, even if pre-seeding put a backstop to that decline.  There aren't many inf sinks in the game and the few big ones are mostly one-shot deals. 

[Oubliette_Red]

Due to stay at home orders more people are playing, so more are crafting Enh's.

 

Prices are creeping because players have to have it now, rather than placing a below the market bid and wait. Bid what you're willing to pay and not 1 inf more.

 

I have honestly never paid the high prices that I've seen listed for the 'last 5'. Because I'm a cheapskate, but mostly because I'm patient.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Also, do not mistake the "last 5" for where the next trade will occur.  In theory, I could buy 5 pieces of common salvage for 2bn each, which would be painting the tape.  The next trade could be at 1.

[The_Warpact]

I always put my salvage that I sell at 1 inf, regardless of type.

[Without_Pause]

14 minutes ago, Oubliette_Red said:

Due to stay at home orders more people are playing, so more are crafting Enh's.

 

Prices are creeping because players have to have it now, rather than placing a below the market bid and wait. Bid what you're willing to pay and not 1 inf more.

 

I have honestly never paid the high prices that I've seen listed for the 'last 5'. Because I'm a cheapskate, but mostly because I'm patient.

The problem I've found is I HAVE to bump my bids or they sit no matter how long I'm willing to wait. I am borderline having to double my bids in places to get similar traction as before. Even with bids below the last 5, bids can be 175% of what I was bidding before and still sitting.

[Heraclea]

For whatever reason - new surge in new characters? - white salvage has actually been selling at 10 recently.  I won't pay that little for it, myself; the workman is worthy of his hire, and sooner or later people will figure out that they can get more just vendoring.  Did stock up on Luck Charms for the lowbies. 

[Psyonico]

My guess is that it has to do with a simple theory... there's too much inf in the world and not enough inf sinks.  Put in bids for rares at 500k and you'll get it within a few days.  I list all my rares at 100k and usually get between 450 and 600k for it.

[Shred Monkey]

 

Here's my theory.  There are 2 types of playing:

1. People playing their level 50s = supply of influence is high relative to # of drops generated, demand for drops is low because their toons are already built. 

2. People playing new toons = supply of influence is low relative to # of drops generated, demand for drops is high as they level up and build up those toons.

 

New powersets being released => more new toons => increase in demand => price increase temporarily but then it will swing back down after people run out of money and have to go back to their 50s to earn some more.

 

At the same time, there will be less influence generated by the low level toons, and there was another change that reduces the amount of influence generated by players who froze their XP without reducing the recipe drop rate.   In theory, the steady state price points should end up lower once the new toon rush slows and things settle.

 

 

[Gremlin]

This morning and this afternoon it was generally below 450k. For a while it was 412k which is the lowest I've seen for some time.

 

Prices always swing up and down at lot. The only issue is whether or not we're looking at a trend of some kind.

[MTeague]

I rarely buy rare salvage anyway.  Every few weeks I'll shazam out 60 rare salvage from Brain Storm Ideas, along with those that dropped and got stuffed in my SG base.  And I'm only crafting the rare recipes that drop, I never buy a rare recipe.... I'm all about the Attuned enhancements anyway.

 

I do sometimes buy Purples recipes and craft them, but not that often.  I've only got two lvl 50 characters right now, after most of a year of playing. But I enjoy levelling slow and levelling up many characters a few levels at a time instead of rushing any one of them to 50. 

 

(yes, OCD man, for every hero I make, I have a villian to mirror them, and I have a whole headcanon of "okay, in the inevitable confrontation, this is how it'll all play out, who beats who by teaming up with who....")

[Peacemoon]

One thing that we don’t mention, is the AH server specific?

 

I have not really seen rare salvage go much higher than 500k, but then again I play during UK hours which seems to be off peak, especially on Everlasting.
 

What I do find however is that because of attuned enhancements, and all enhancements sharing the same pool regardless of level, that level 50 enhancements are rarely worth crafting. If you add up the 500k crafting charge with the 500k for any rare salvage, your not making much profit if it only sells for 1.5m. And then sometimes it won’t sell for a long time even at a reasonable price. 
 

Personally I’m not seeing as much as inflation as everyone else. If anything prices seem to be going down.

 

As for epics, just bid 18-20m and wait patiently 😉

[ArchVileTerror]

Auction House is server-wide.  As-in:  All The Homecoming Servers.

It is _not_ Shard-dependent.  Shards being:  Everlasting, Indomitable, Reunion, et cetera.

[MTeague]

Yellow Salvage has definitely gone up.   

Once upon a time, a bid of 1,250 would buy yellow salvage within minutes if not instantly. 

Last night, I bid 25,009 on many pieces of yellow salvage and 3 hours later, not a single one was purchased.  (I haven't had a chance to log in a check if any purchased overnight, I'm skimming the forums while waiting on code translations while working from hime.)\

 

That said, both things are well below the seeded cost, so we're still talking player-to-player transactions. 

Could be some farmers decided too many people were lowballing the hell out of yellow salvage and they just delete it to make room for more rare salvage.

Could be just a big spike in people playing converter roulette and now lots more are trying to buy the exact same supply that's been coming in most nights, so we get into bidding wars with each other.

 

 

 

[Without_Pause]

17 minutes ago, ArchVileTerror said:

Auction House is server-wide.  As-in:  All The Homecoming Servers.

It is _not_ Shard-dependent.  Shards being:  Everlasting, Indomitable, Reunion, et cetera.

This is why when you do a server transfer everything in the AH remains.

[Murcielago]

I usually buy salvage in 100 unit bids and usually have it filled in a day or two at the seeded price. 

[Oubliette_Red]

2 hours ago, Peacemoon said:

One thing that we don’t mention, is the AH server specific?

 

I have not really seen rare salvage go much higher than 500k, but then again I play during UK hours which seems to be off peak, especially on Everlasting.
 

What I do find however is that because of attuned enhancements, and all enhancements sharing the same pool regardless of level, that level 50 enhancements are rarely worth crafting. If you add up the 500k crafting charge with the 500k for any rare salvage, your not making much profit if it only sells for 1.5m. And then sometimes it won’t sell for a long time even at a reasonable price. 
 

Personally I’m not seeing as much as inflation as everyone else. If anything prices seem to be going down.

 

As for epics, just bid 18-20m and wait patiently 😉

I think what most players do is craft L50 Uncommon recipes, because they are less likely to require Rare salvage, then use converters to get a Rare Enh.

[Lines]

1 minute ago, Oubliette_Red said:

I think what most players do is craft L50 Uncommon recipes, because they are less likely to require Rare salvage, then use converters to get a Rare Enh.

Better yet, craft lower level uncommon recipes to reduce the crafting cost even more.

 

That, and if your converters come from merits then the expenses are negligible.

[Oubliette_Red]

Just now, Lines said:

Better yet, craft lower level uncommon recipes to reduce the crafting cost even more.

 

That, and if your converters come from merits then the expenses are negligible.

Pretty much. When it comes to Proc's I'll try to go for the lowest level available for the set.

[Gremlin]

On HC I'll sell a high level recipe for an item I actually want in my build because laundering it through the AH makes it both cheaper and attuned. Jimmy pointed out that the goal is to move inf from high level to low level toons. It seems to be working well but it does seem a bit odd.

[Peacemoon]

Good tips everyone, I will try use the converters for this, I hadn't really thought of that much. I've been using them to change epic drops into epic sets I'd use. Once that is done that would be a good use for them!

 

The only problem I had at low level, was I didn't have enough influence really to pay the AH charge, in order to list expensive items in the first place. Or it felt very high risk, because if the item didn't sell, that was all my influence on one item. I'm not really much of a gambler so I shied away from it. 

 

Now I'm high level, not many of the recipes are worth crafting over just selling the level 50 mats and recipes individually. There are a few level 50 recipes which don't require rare salvage that have been worth it, or something like LotG, but otherwise the time I spend crafting and selling would usually be better just mass killing.

 

The way the AH works does seem really good to me, because it allows enhancements to be much more available for less influence. But if I could make a change, I might reduce the fee amount for low level players (although exploitable I guess), and reduce the crafting cost at level 50. With the way the AH works, the 450k crafting fee for a level 50 enhancement feels a bit regressive. Maybe cap it at 100k which is around level 40? Economics isn't my specialty, so just going on my own experience, but does explain why people sell the recipes. 

[Peacemoon]

16 hours ago, Oubliette_Red said:

Pretty much. When it comes to Proc's I'll try to go for the lowest level available for the set.

I usually buy procs as attuned just to remove the hassle of factoring that in. The rest of the set as attuned or normal depending on what works best. Cloud Senses is a great set for my Dark Servant, but caps at level 30. Since I don't get the servant till 38(33), there's no reason to have the set attuned, so I boosted them all to 30+5 just to squeeze out as much stats as possible.

 

I also do the same for epic sets since they auto-attune (unless i accidentally buy them as attuned epics...ugh hassle!), but I tend to focus on enhancements that do -end cost, as a lot of the other stats are already capped by epics. 

 

Also merits do have a value, in theory you can buy an epic enhancement for every 100 and sell it for 20 million. So each merit is worth just under 200k if you were only interested in monetizing them... 

[Gremlin]

22 minutes ago, Peacemoon said:

but otherwise the time I spend crafting and selling would usually be better just mass killing

Playing converter roulette and working out whether individual drops are worth crafting are both quite time consuming. If you'd like to do a bit of trading without spending much time on it then you can just focus on crafting a single item. Find something desirable, buy a few recipes at a time at the lowest level, craft them and sell the IOs. It's very low risk and low effort because you always know what salvage to buy and what the usual prices are. There are quite a few niches with 100% profit margins. With margins like that, you don't have to worry much about changes in salvage prices, auction house fees etc.

 

There are a few things that can go wrong. The main risk point is when you start a new niche. It might turn out that the IO price is unusually high at the moment so check out the prices for a few days before starting. Secondly, be very wary about increasing your selling prices if the price of the IO starts rising. (As it will at the weekend) At some point it'll drop back down to the usual amount and you'll need to relist the last batch of IOs. Finally, don't invest more than 10% of your inf in a niche until you've got a feel for it. Start small with something like Thunderstrike.

 

You'll make the odd mistake but on average you'll make so much inf that the mistakes don't matter. You can make a few million inf a day for about 10 minutes effort and virtually no stress.