Uncommon salvage spikes?

[DeathsHead]

Hi,

 

One of the things I've been loving about the Homecoming servers is that the market is seeded with 10,000,000+ of all of the salvage pieces. One of my favorite things about this was that the prices for these things were essentially steady at reasonable rates (around 500 inf for common, 1 - 2K inf for uncommon, and 500K inf for rare). However, I've noticed a few times that the prices will spike very high; and not just the last five sales, when I see this I still place bids at the usual rates and wait for up to several hours for the system to go through the millions of existing market offers to find ones that match but they never do. For example, today common salvage is going for over 50K inf, whereas it's normally only 2K. I've tried to purchase a few different pieces and they're all coming up this way.  This isn't necessarily a huge deal, but I'm really curious about how this happens. I know some players who will engage in market PvP, and try to monopolize certain things or artificially inflate the prices, but that seems like something very hard to do when there are millions of an item for sale. Can this be explained?

 

Thanks!

[Coyotedancer]

There's a whole thread on this somewhere... Uncommon salvage prices have been on the up-swing lately. It may be a natural "market forces" thing, or it might be intentional manipulation. No one's quite sure at this point. 

 

We do know it'll never go over 100k, though. That's the seeded price.

[AboveTheChemist]

There have been at least three threads on this actually. The first two are fairly reasonable discussions, and the last one is Mr. Toad's Wild Ride (and it happens to use my screenshot as the representative image).

 

 

 

 

Edited April 27, 2020 by AboveTheChemist

[Gremlin]

Hi there.

 

The devs seed salvage by putting 10,000,000 pieces up for sale at certain prices. The prices are 1,000,000 for rare salvage, 100,000 for uncommon and 10,000 for common. This means that people rarely buy seeded salvage. They're nearly always buying salvage listed by other players. I believe this is part of a deliberate policy to leave the market alone as much as possible but to surround it with a mechanisms that will cap prices if they go crazy.

 

Salvage is pooled. There are 3 pools; one for each rarity. This is why all yellow salvage is trading at the same price.

 

I've just checked the market and commons are selling for 500 and rares are selling for 500k. These are the prices I've come to expect since I started watching in Feb. Uncommon salvage has been getting more expensive. IIRC the cheapest I saw was around 8k. It's usually over 25k and it's been at 50k for more than a day or so a couple of times since then. It seems to be sitting at 50k at the moment.

 

It looks like the price of yellow salvage has been trending upwards since HC launched. Like you, I doubt that this is due to deliberate price manipulation. I agree that it would be a huge undertaking. I don't think a single player could manage it. Perhaps a large cartel of farmers could control enough supply to push up the price but I doubt they could be bothered. Uncommon salvage is small beer for them. If a large enough group of very rich marketeers got together then they could push the price up for a short while but they'd almost certainly lose money by doing so. So that seems unlikely as well. If anyone was going to do this then they'd probably pick an easier, more profitable niche.

 

I'm pretty sure that we're seeing is the result of plain old market forces. We currently burn through it at a phenomenal quantity of yellow salvage because of rare roulette. This is a trading strategy that involves crafting uncommon recipes and then converting them into rare IOs. High volume trading always causes the cost of the inputs to rise and the outputs to fall. We're currently looking at unusually high prices for yellow salvage and low prices for rare IOs. That seems pretty conclusive to me. (At least I think the IOs are cheap. I'm not very familiar with them so I could well be wrong.)

 

I suspect that more and more players are playing rare roulette and that's why the prices keep changing.

 

Sadly, we don't have any hard data about what's going on in the market so we can only make educated guesses.

Edited April 27, 2020 by Gremlin
Corrected statement about IO prices.

[Gremlin]

13 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

or it might be intentional manipulation

I can't think of any way that we could spot this if it was happening. Any ideas?

[AboveTheChemist]

I will also add that I have had a handful of 10,000 inf bids up for several weeks now and none of them have filled, so expect to spend more than that for uncommon salvage. The last time I bought some was at 12,500 several weeks ago but I have no idea if that is still a viable offer price for them any more.

[DeathsHead]

Thanks everyone for the replies, and thanks @AboveTheChemist for the links and @Gremlin for the detailed explanation!

 

I didn't realize that 100K was the seeded price for uncommon, and great point that what we are buying is almost exclusively coming from other players; that helps a lot to understand how things are trending. With that in mind, 10 - 50K and up is still a "good" price for uncommon salvage then, and the days of 1 - 2K prices I suppose are now "the good old days" lol.

 

Thanks again!

[Gremlin]

8 minutes ago, DeathsHead said:

the days of 1 - 2K prices I suppose are now "the good old days" lol

Just out of curiosity, do you remember when you last saw uncommons going for that amount?

[tidge]

A copy from one of my earlier posts, where my conclusion was that it was not likely market manipulation but the uncommon salvage was artificially low:

 

The supply of cheap uncommon salvage could have dried up simply because AE farmers may have switched their INF-making tactics to use the AH instead.

 

IIRC the common: uncommon : rare ratio was 22 : 5 : 1, which may imply that yellows have been bargain priced for a long time!

 

My personal thought is that it would take a lot of effort (in buying them) or apathy (from not bothering to list them) to dry up the supply of commons, and rares are already in the ballpark of the seed price... so if the largest source of salvage (AE farmers) switched tactics I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see yellow salvage in the 50K - 100K range.

 

My observations in the late-April-2020 market (not working niches, not really buying, but just crafting and selling drops) are:

• The price of "direct-from-merit" items has dropped. I bought many discounted enhancement boosters over the weekend for a new level 50. Converter prices remain low, even though I often see the last 5 price is occasionally 90K -100K each. I glanced at Catalysts and it looked like they hadn't moved much... I didn't get any bites at the price I wanted to pay.
• Defense sets like LotG seem quite depressed, while Reactive Defenses seems to have jumped. In some cases it looked like the relative value of the sets had flipped. I often 6-slot Reactive Defenses, so I'm not surprised at the jump but this isn't how the market had been pricing them. I think that the Defense sets balancing out is a sign more people are getting into the market.
• Healing set prices were quite depressed, even sets like Preventive Medicine (another good 6-piece set).
• Adjusted Targeting: Recharge saw a nice jump. Folks with Mind Link may have taken my advice and bought up the supply... Gaussian's Fire Control set prices were depressed.
• Generally, across the board the rare IO prices were at the lowest they had been for a long time.

RNGsus was toying with me this past week: I ended up with many more PVP recipes than Purples (5:1) than I expected (3:1) so I sold PVPs and bought the last few Purples I needed:

• PVP prices seemed standard, but I don't venture into this market much except when I want to clean out the SG base or leverage the market to catalyze some for low-level toons. I did only a small amount of roulette and sold all of them above 10 MInf, which seems right.
• The Purple market looked normal (long term bids had filled low, BIN prices around 20 MInf) although there were some odd pockets that I exploited (but only to save Inf and to invest in a future build)

For larffs: I also ventured into the Inspiration market to get another WW badge and it was the usual hilarity. Nothing to report except that it always brings a smile to my face.

[Coyotedancer]

3 hours ago, Gremlin said:

I can't think of any way that we could spot this if it was happening. Any ideas?

 

None off-hand, I'm afraid.

It still seems like a very silly thing to do to me... But... People have done stranger things just for the absurdity of it, so you never know.

[Yomo Kimyata]

I haven't seen it trade below 10k in what feels like months, but my sense of time seems a little off nowadays.

[Intrinsic]

Over the last couple of months there has been an observable price floor with very strong support.  The floor remains at a specific price for a couple of weeks, then jumps several thousand inf.  I can place bids just above this price floor and have them fill fairly quickly, so there seems to be decent trade volume.  Any bids below the floor never fill.

 

Of course we don't have access to complete market information, so I can't say with 100% certainty.  But I would be very surprised if all or even most of the salvage being bought at the price floor is for legit crafting purposes.  And the price floor I described above doesn't behave the way I would expect it to if it were due to typical market forces.  I think someone is artificially creating it to mess with the price of yellow salvage.

Edited April 27, 2020 by Intrinsic

[Grouchybeast]

I started playing again in October, so I don't have any data from before then.  But I searched my chatlogs and from October to the middle of February, I was bidding 1,111 inf for Uncommon salvage and buying it immediately.  In the early few weeks I even cheapskated a few for 555.  After Christmas a few higher bids up to 5,555 start to appear, but they're still mostly 1,111.  From around the 15th of Feb onwards, I start always paying more -- 5,555 up to the beginning of March, and then by the middle of March it's 15,555 for either immediate purchase or being left as a 'buy it soon' bid.  I haven't played much in April, so I only have a few bids logged, but from the middle of April they're up at 25,555. 

 

I don't do converter roulette, so I'm not buying tons of salvage at a time and I usually make the bids then come back in a day or a few days to collect them.

[Troo]

8 hours ago, DeathsHead said:

I know some players who will engage in market PvP, and try to monopolize certain things or artificially inflate the prices

What's their names?

[tidge]

16 hours ago, Troo said:

What's their names?

You don't know them; they live in Canada.

[Ukase]

I don't know how much I had to do with this or not. The past 10 days, I had been placing bids on PvP recipes, buying as many as I could that met my asking price, crafting, and selling. As a result, I needed to keep all 3 tiers of salvage on hand. So, I'd place what I say are reasonable bids - 500 for common, 50k for uncommon and 500k for rare in stacks of 5, as there's only so much space a level 10 can stash the inventory. (said character is earning Chronologist before I do anything else with it)

Since it has the badge now, I've cancelled all bids on recipes, salvage, etc. - but if I think about it - I must have been going through 600 uncommons about once every few hours. And that's just me. There's at least two others that I know are doing this, as we've been having to increase our bids to surpass each others bids. 

The idea of a player or players being behind the increase in salvage is just ludicrous. Even at lots of 100, going from 2k to 60k...that's a lot of clicking for very little return. Top room in salvage inventory is 182, I think. You'd have to have multiple characters doing this, probably three accounts..it's just too tedious in my head to think someone would do that. They'd have an easier time of buying ALL the converters and reselling them at 101k each. (a thought that has popped in my head more than once, seeing these converters sell so cheaply. But with the big merits being doled out for the weeklies...it would take quite some time to see a return, and it would be downright mean)

Also - anecdotally - either a lot of folks have gone back to work, or something - but I've seen prices of a number of IOs drop 25%. I've thought that it's really not even worth the effort to use the converters for their designed purpose now. In fact, I've three accounts, each with a great afk farmer - and none of them are farming now. 

I have one pseudo farming for incarnate xp and threads (and the emp merits which I'm really after) and I'll pick and choose those recipe drops, but if the prices don't pick back up, I simply won't bother. 2m for an Aegis? 5m for LotG 7.5%? Sure, I like to buy these cheaply, but I'm not going to spend time converting for such a low profit. Already have made my fortune, maybe it's time to let someone else play the farm game while I spend and use what's stored in my email and sg bases. 

Interesting times, for sure! 

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

Also - anecdotally - either a lot of folks have gone back to work, or something - but I've seen prices of a number of IOs drop 25%. I've thought that it's really not even worth the effort to use the converters for their designed purpose now. In fact, I've three accounts, each with a great afk farmer - and none of them are farming now. 

Interesting times, for sure! 

Agree completely, and it is mostly across the board that IO prices have dropped.  In some cases I can point to clear supply increases; in others, it just looks like a buyers' strike.

 

This is coupled with @tidge's observation that people seem to be liquidating merits for easily traded items and (mostly) dumping them on the market.

 

Ironically, this is a golden age to buy items if you are an inf farmer.

[Lockpick]

On 4/29/2020 at 9:55 AM, Yomo Kimyata said:

Ironically, this is a golden age to buy items if you are an inf farmer.

 

I guess this puts paid to the argument from the farmers in the other thread.