I out-evil'd myself.

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 minutes ago, TemporalVileTerror said:

"Incentive to be prosocial."

That's the crux of WHY I think this market model is a huge problem, and why I'm a strong advocate for making further changes to this market system to promote behaviour which feeds in to spreading benefits to the entirety of the community, while minimizing the opportunities for predatory and antisocial behaviour.

 

I will continue to place items in to the market listed at 1 Inf.  Yes, that means that predatory players will be able to exploit my efforts to drive down prices and create accessibility.  I just hope to encourage a substantial enough number of other players to follow suit with me, so that we can undermine the profiteers through sheer volume.  If the collective community expects to be able to buy Common Salvage for 1 Inf at all times, market forces should limit the number of players who are able to capitalize on buying up stock and trying to resell at grossly inflated prices.

It would be good ideas, in my opinion, to further incentivize players to share items while also limiting the ease which predators can exploit that.

[Grouchybeast]

On 3/8/2021 at 7:53 PM, TemporalVileTerror said:

I will continue to place items in to the market listed at 1 Inf.  Yes, that means that predatory players will be able to exploit my efforts to drive down prices and create accessibility.  I just hope to encourage a substantial enough number of other players to follow suit with me, so that we can undermine the profiteers through sheer volume.  If the collective community expects to be able to buy Common Salvage for 1 Inf at all times, market forces should limit the number of players who are able to capitalize on buying up stock and trying to resell at grossly inflated prices.

Unfortunately, I don't think they the collective community is every likely to be very interested in dying (or at least sitting with no IOs) on the hill of paying 1 inf  for common salvage versus 100 or 1000 inf.  1 v 100 v 1000 doesn't mean a whole lot when you can sell a couple of level 50 common IO recipes and buy enough white salvage to completely IO out a character.

[Christopher Robin]

On 2/28/2021 at 9:19 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

........................................................As a player, this reinforces that this is not a market driven economy and that any fiction of a free market can disappear in an instant at the whim of a GM.  I don't have words right now to describe how I feel about this......................................................

This.

 

The dots before and after indicate more was said so go back and read the full post in context if you want but THIS

this is the main reason I haven't played the game in months. When I realized my efforts to make back

a small portion of the vast wealth I used to have on live were being actively thwarted

not by other players but by developer tools I was.... mad/sad/disheartened all of the above.

 

Don't get me wrong I still love it here and am thrilled to have the game available again.

I'm still doing all the stuff on the forums I did before (in the art section primarily) to try and grow the community.

Answering questions, helping people with costumes, hosting contests (cough see my sig cough cough),

giving away free art of peoples heroes, etc etc etc. but I haven't gotten past the costume

creator stage and made it into the actual game in a very long while.

[Ura Hero]

47 minutes ago, Christopher Robin said:

This.

 

The dots before and after indicate more was said so go back and read the full post in context if you want but THIS

this is the main reason I haven't played the game in months. When I realized my efforts to make back

a small portion of the vast wealth I used to have on live were being actively thwarted

not by other players but by developer tools I was.... mad/sad/disheartened all of the above.

 

Don't get me wrong I still love it here and am thrilled to have the game available again.

I'm still doing all the stuff on the forums I did before (in the art section primarily) to try and grow the community.

Answering questions, helping people with costumes, hosting contests (cough see my sig cough cough),

giving away free art of peoples heroes, etc etc etc. but I haven't gotten past the costume

creator stage and made it into the actual game in a very long while.

 

 

If you had read farther down (linked below), you would have seen that GM Impervium said that it was on his regular account and no dev tools were used.  I am fairly certain that other than seeding the market with set price salvage to keep the Luck Charm fiasco from happening again that the GM's are not using any dev tools to screw around with the market.  Why am I certain?  Because way too many of us make too much influence in the market for it to be fixed.

 

Making influence on Homecoming is absurdly easy.  I made over 5 billion this month and I didn't spend more than ten minutes a day.  If the dev's were jacking the market that wouldn't be possible.  I know several folks in this forum make incredibly more than that in a week.  I just dabble and I really don't try hard and it comes in hand over fist.  There are tons of guides on how to do it.  No need to start trying to raise up conspiracy theories that have no founding in truth just because a GM posted something funny that happens to all of us who play the market that gets taken out of context every time someone reads it without reading all of it.

 

 

 

[Christopher Robin]

@Ura Hero

I (most always) read every word of every post in a thread before commenting and I know what was said.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding me or I wasn't clear enough, I am not talking about the incident in the OP

but about the day when I realized my efforts were actively being thwarted. When it happened I logged

out and have yet to log back in. I only quoted a portion of Yomo's post because what he said

sounded like the same realization that hit me and I felt he summed it up pretty well.

 

I know you can make money easily in this game and I am not destitute by any means but it occurs to me that

I will most likely never again be where I was before and that it is that way by design and WAI bothers me.

 

Normally I am not one who complains and I struggled with hitting the submit button for a hot minute there but seeing...

2 hours ago, Christopher Robin said:

disappear in an instant at the whim of a GM.

struck a nerve and so I posted.

 

 

Edited March 11, 2021 by Christopher Robin

[GM Impervium]

And people wonder why we barely ever post =P

Snark aside, I take full responsibility for the misunderstanding, and apologize for any grief I caused. @Christopher Robin, I promise you that neither I (in my capacity as a GM) nor the other GMs, nor the Dev team, are doing anything to sabotage or impede the ability of players to use and make influence off the Market. We don't use dev tools to manipulate prices or availability. We're hands-off, aside from some "quality of life" things which I'll list explicitly below.

Seeding (as stated by @Ura Hero) : There's always a large number of salvage of all tiers available, though for prices far higher than you ever see them normally (I forget the exact prices, but I *think* it's Commons for 1,000, Uncommons for 10,000, and Rares for 1 million). We also seed some special salvage that you're otherwise unlikely to find, like the Access Bypass and Prototype Element (<- I think those are actually bucketed in with the rest of the Rare invention salvage, but I'm not 100% sure). This ensures availability, and places a ceiling on salvage prices. We also seed the Super-Packs, which cannot be obtained by any other means.

Bucketing: In addition to the above, all invention salvage within a rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare) is bucketed. So if you sell a Kinetic Weapon, and another player is looking to buy a Luck Charm, your Kinetic Weapon will be "turned into" a Luck Charm to be sold to that other player (assuming the pricing works out). We also bucket IOs to an extent. All levels of a given Set IO are bucketed. So if you want a level 25 Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge, and someone puts their level 50 LotGg: +Recharge on the market at the price you're looking to buy at? Then you get that LotG, but at the level you wanted it. This also works for Attuned versions of that Set IO. However, this only works on a Per-IO basis: I can't try to sell an LotG: Def/End and expect to have it turned into a +Recharge IO for someone to buy.

 

Basic/Common IOs are not bucketed OR seeded.

Increased Availability: Less about the AH itself, but PvP Recipes drop from PvE foes now, and, along with every other recipe (Very Rares included), are available to purchase with Reward Merits should luck not be on your side. This places an effective price ceiling on these goods. If they ever get "too expensive", people can just get whatever they want from a Merit Vendor instead. Heck, some people do that anyway, because they don't want to spend the time buying and selling converters. Speaking of: Converters! Did you get a lousy Red Fortune: Endurance as a drop? No problem! Craft it up, use up some converters, and BAM, you got a nice juicy LotG: +Recharge, without spending millions on the AH! And then you can use it... or sell it, MAKING millions! The only downside to the increased availability is that your fortune is likely to come piecemeal now, as compared to Live where one lucky drop would fund your alts forever.

That's it, really. For better or worse, gone are the days of a piece of common salvage going for 25,000 inf, or using in-betweens to buy certain items for over 2 billion inf, while other items sit unused in a glut (even the most worthless Set IOs can now be converted into something worthwhile, and either used or sold, to either save or make money). This raises the price of "junk" Set IOs, and lowers the price of desired ones, putting most things in a happy medium. Note that our measures mainly target Salvage and certain (but not all) Enhancements. Some parts of the market, like Inspirations and Basic IOs, are completely player-driven.

But yeah, that's all we do, and why we do it. Promise 😃 (unless I'm forgetting something, in which case, please assume ignorance instead of malice on my part; I'll edit this post with corrections if need be!)

EDIT: Oh, we posted at like, the exact same time. Awkward!

 

Edited March 11, 2021 by GM Impervium
word choice

[Yomo Kimyata]

14 hours ago, GM Impervium said:

We're hands-off, aside from some "quality of life" things which I'll list explicitly below.

Seeding (as stated by @Ura Hero) : There's always a large number of salvage of all tiers available, though for prices far higher than you ever see them normally (I forget the exact prices, but I *think* it's Commons for 1,000, Uncommons for 10,000, and Rares for 1 million). We also seed some special salvage that you're otherwise unlikely to find, like the Access Bypass and Prototype Element (<- I think those are actually bucketed in with the rest of the Rare invention salvage, but I'm not 100% sure). This ensures availability, and places a ceiling on salvage prices. We also seed the Super-Packs, which cannot be obtained by any other means.

Bucketing: In addition to the above, all invention salvage within a rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare) is bucketed. So if you sell a Kinetic Weapon, and another player is looking to buy a Luck Charm, your Kinetic Weapon will be "turned into" a Luck Charm to be sold to that other player (assuming the pricing works out). We also bucket IOs to an extent. All levels of a given Set IO are bucketed. So if you want a level 25 Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge, and someone puts their level 50 LotGg: +Recharge on the market at the price you're looking to buy at? Then you get that LotG, but at the level you wanted it. This also works for Attuned versions of that Set IO. However, this only works on a Per-IO basis: I can't try to sell an LotG: Def/End and expect to have it turned into a +Recharge IO for someone to buy.

 

Basic/Common IOs are not bucketed OR seeded.

Increased Availability: Less about the AH itself, but PvP Recipes drop from PvE foes now, and, along with every other recipe (Very Rares included), are available to purchase with Reward Merits should luck not be on your side. This places an effective price ceiling on these goods. If they ever get "too expensive", people can just get whatever they want from a Merit Vendor instead. Heck, some people do that anyway, because they don't want to spend the time buying and selling converters. Speaking of: Converters! Did you get a lousy Red Fortune: Endurance as a drop? No problem! Craft it up, use up some converters, and BAM, you got a nice juicy LotG: +Recharge, without spending millions on the AH! And then you can use it... or sell it, MAKING millions! The only downside to the increased availability is that your fortune is likely to come piecemeal now, as compared to Live where one lucky drop would fund your alts forever.

That's it, really. For better or worse, gone are the days of a piece of common salvage going for 25,000 inf, or using in-betweens to buy certain items for over 2 billion inf, while other items sit unused in a glut (even the most worthless Set IOs can now be converted into something worthwhile, and either used or sold, to either save or make money). This raises the price of "junk" Set IOs, and lowers the price of desired ones, putting most things in a happy medium. Note that our measures mainly target Salvage and certain (but not all) Enhancements. Some parts of the market, like Inspirations and Basic IOs, are completely player-driven.

But yeah, that's all we do, and why we do it. Promise 😃 (unless I'm forgetting something, in which case, please assuming ignorance instead of malice on my part; I'll edit this post with corrections if need be!)

EDIT: Oh, we posted at like, the exact same time. Awkward!

 

This part is great and, IMO, should be stickied somewhere!  Nice description from a person who knows first hand how and why this has been instituted.

 

On 3/1/2021 at 4:09 PM, Ura Hero said:

 

GM's are players too after all.  Heck, any one of us could be a GM and no one would ever know.  Why should they be held to a different standard than we are?  There are some pretty strict rules for GM's from what I understand from reading the post that was recently made asking for help.  I really don't think this was done on a GM account even though it was posted on a GM account. 

This has been gnawing at me for a few days.  I'm gonna clutch my pearls here a little bit and say, yes, I do think GMs should be held to a higher standard than players.  I do think it's funny that OP posted a story about  getting bitten in the butt for sloppily manipulating a market (that I completely misread on first viewing, and I apologize for that.)  And I am certainly not claiming that they violated the code of conduct ("This includes trying to deceive or otherwise cheat other players for your own gain").  But I can see how others might see it that way and say, "Well, if a *GM* is doing it, why the heck shouldn't I do it?"  

 

Again, pearl clutching on my part and frankly not a big deal in the global scale of things.  Just something I wanted to get off my chest.

[Mezmera]

This sounds like the plot from the Gamestop stock shenanigans.  Would that make you the evil Hedge Fund/Robin Hood side vs The People who got a bit of that wealth distribution?

[nihilii]

On 3/8/2021 at 8:53 PM, TemporalVileTerror said:

"Incentive to be prosocial."

That's the crux of WHY I think this market model is a huge problem, and why I'm a strong advocate for making further changes to this market system to promote behaviour which feeds in to spreading benefits to the entirety of the community, while minimizing the opportunities for predatory and antisocial behaviour.

 

I will continue to place items in to the market listed at 1 Inf.  Yes, that means that predatory players will be able to exploit my efforts to drive down prices and create accessibility.  I just hope to encourage a substantial enough number of other players to follow suit with me, so that we can undermine the profiteers through sheer volume.  If the collective community expects to be able to buy Common Salvage for 1 Inf at all times, market forces should limit the number of players who are able to capitalize on buying up stock and trying to resell at grossly inflated prices.

It would be good ideas, in my opinion, to further incentivize players to share items while also limiting the ease which predators can exploit that.

This reminds me of the situation with hands-me-down stuff and Africa.

 

Intuitively, it feels like a good idea. If you don't have the use for the stuff, why throw it away? Give it to someone in need.

In truth, massive hands-me-downs have obliterated some sectors of local economies in several African countries. People who should be able to earn a living, say, making clothes, find themselves out of a job.

 

In theory, job destruction isn't a bad thing because people just move to different sectors. In practice, workers with low education and low skill and live in places with little opportunities find themselves struggling to adapt.

 

OK, not to go too far in the real life analogy - at this point there's already nuance we're glossing over. But I remember the days of Live where I would get common salvage as a lowbie, and I would sell each piece for 500 inf, 1K inf, 10k inf, and I would earn decent money like that. Especially as the lowbie salvage wasn't farmed like the highlevel salvage was. Getting a Luck Charm was often the jackpot.

 

Remember people selfcapping at certain levels to earn more from a specific recipe/salvage range? I'm not actually convinced this was ever optimal in inf/time, but it was a route people did take. And they felt good about it. People like to earn their way.

 

Salvage prices to 1 inf work directly against anyone's economic incentive to sell them to the market. At this point, just about any other activity is more rewarding. Punching mobs at level 10 will give you more inf/minute than listing salvage.

 

So basically, you're discouraged from using the market. I delete my common salvage and my uncommon salvage. I delete my yellow recipes. It is simply not worth the time to list.

To be sure, one could argue the problem could be fixed by UX. A single right-click with "dump all white salvage to the market". Why not. Yet, we're still missing the past economic granularity that encouraged players to pursue different routes for what they thought was the best way to earn money - or at least, the best way for them.

 

It has been argued in the past flippers aren't predatory, but rather return the price to a point of equilibrium. I'm inclined to agree with that statement. In a liquid enough market and with enough information, and in a fictional world where all goods can be obtained by anyone without limitation of rent, flippers are bound to attract competition.

 

Even in the less egalitarian game world of Live, people struggled to manipulate the price of a specific piece of common salvage for more than a few hours; and the effort they spent, in money and time doing so, was inefficient. If anything, they burned money, and for the sake of burning money. *THAT* could be arguably antisocial. Thankfully, these attempts at manipulation were anecdotal.

 

...and I would argue the waves of volatility were positive events. Motion is progress, movement is entertainment. Proactive sellers got the opportunity to hunt for the temporarily inflated goods and sell them at a higher profit. Infuriated buyers got the chance... to rant at the market manipulation! Getting upset at things is fun too, in moderation.

 

I don't want an utopia where salvage is always listed at 1 inf. Because that utopia essentially says we don't care for certain aspects of the game, and we're going to erase them. Which at this point would make the market for salvage mostly bad UX - might as well buy salvage directly from vendors for 1 inf. Might as well remove white salvage from the game and autocomplete a recipe needing white salvage. I am not trying to ridicule the argument through absurdity, I say these things seriously. 1 inf is essentially the same as 0 inf, at which point we're just wasting our most precious resource - time. It would make sense to streamline the process, to save us time and clicks.

 

 

[Andreah]

11 hours ago, nihilii said:

Even in the less egalitarian game world of Live, people struggled to manipulate the price of a specific piece of common salvage for more than a few hours; and the effort they spent, in money and time doing so, was inefficient. If anything, they burned money, and for the sake of burning money. *THAT* could be arguably antisocial. Thankfully, these attempts at manipulation were anecdotal.

 

I did this myself, several times, on live. I cornered the Luck Charm and also the Iron markets, each once. I lost money both times, and  was only able to sustain it for a few hours of constant attention.  I believe it would be harder here on HC to do to the invention salvage markets due to the bucketing, and be even more of a money loser. Perhaps a coordinated team of players could do so, for a time. There's just too much market volume and our invention inventories are too shallow to buffer it.

 

I have cornered other markets here on HC for very short periods, but only in a very loose sense. I could set a buy price that I was willing to buy all of something below, and a sell price that was just above my own buy price, but not be able to sustain enough spread to cover the 10% auction fee. To truly corner a market, you have to be able to drive out competitors who bid just a little more than you do, and who are willing, even temporarily, to possibly lose money by listing below your benchmark sell price. You need deep pockets, and lots of inventory to do this, and you will almost certainly lose out over time. That 10% is hard to overcome, and leaves a big hole for others to go through.

 

One thing a player can do, which is a lighter burden and less predatory, is to be a "Market Maker" for a few items. A market maker uses a large inventory of some item and well-chosen bid and ask prices to set a bound on the price. Say, it's rare invention salvage. A Market Maker might buy up thousands of these, and then put in huge numbers of bid to buy at the lower end of the usual range, and offer huge numbers to sell at the high end of the range. This protects those who want to sell at "1" by ensuring they'll always at least get your bottom market-maker buy price, and protects people who might urgently need salvage from having to pay more than your market-maker sell price. And if the market-maker sets those prices smartly, they'll not run out of money to buy more at the buy price or run out of inventory to sell at the sell price, and will earn some inf along the way.

[Grouchybeast]

On 3/12/2021 at 9:22 AM, nihilii said:

Even in the less egalitarian game world of Live, people struggled to manipulate the price of a specific piece of common salvage for more than a few hours; and the effort they spent, in money and time doing so, was inefficient. If anything, they burned money, and for the sake of burning money. *THAT* could be arguably antisocial.

 

In MMOs, burning money for the sake of burning money is probably the purest prosocial market activity that exists.

[Andreah]

5 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

In MMOs, burning money for the sake of burning money is probably the purest prosocial market activity that exists.

Even if all they do is park the money on unused alts or in emails, so long as it it out of circulation, it helps keep inflation down. 

 

What we really need (although this would make some people scream) is a series of badges that are progressed through by giving Inf to an NPC (who deletes it) in large amounts. A badge for deleting 1 Billion, another for deleting 5 Billion, then 10 Billion, One Hundred Billion, and the top-tier badge of badges, the Trillion Influence/Infamy Destroyer. You would be able to earn progress on any of these badges in one billion inf increments.

 

Badge completionists would hate this, of course, and I would not blame them.

[Yomo Kimyata]

18 minutes ago, Andreah said:

Even if all they do is park the money on unused alts or in emails, so long as it it out of circulation, it helps keep inflation down. 

 

What we really need (although this would make some people scream) is a series of badges that are progressed through by giving Inf to an NPC (who deletes it) in large amounts. A badge for deleting 1 Billion, another for deleting 5 Billion, then 10 Billion, One Hundred Billion, and the top-tier badge of badges, the Trillion Influence/Infamy Destroyer. You would be able to earn progress on any of these badges in one billion inf increments.

 

Badge completionists would hate this, of course, and I would not blame them.

Reposting because this way I get to like it twice.

 

EDIT:  If I could like my own post, that is.

 

Edited March 16, 2021 by Yomo Kimyata

[Grouchybeast]

3 hours ago, Andreah said:

What we really need (although this would make some people scream) is a series of badges that are progressed through by giving Inf to an NPC (who deletes it) in large amounts. A badge for deleting 1 Billion, another for deleting 5 Billion, then 10 Billion, One Hundred Billion, and the top-tier badge of badges, the Trillion Influence/Infamy Destroyer. You would be able to earn progress on any of these badges in one billion inf increments.

 

Badge completionists would hate this, of course, and I would not blame them.

 

I still think that re-enabling SG Prestige purely for bragging rights would be a wonderful inf sink.  No effect on bases, just a league table of the top prestige groups on each server.

[Yomo Kimyata]

17 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

I still think that re-enabling SG Prestige purely for bragging rights would be a wonderful inf sink.  No effect on bases, just a league table of the top prestige groups on each server.

 

This even moreso than the badge idea.  Signed, cosigned, resigned.

 

[Ukase]

22 hours ago, Andreah said:

Even if all they do is park the money on unused alts or in emails, so long as it it out of circulation, it helps keep inflation down. 

 

What we really need (although this would make some people scream) is a series of badges that are progressed through by giving Inf to an NPC (who deletes it) in large amounts. A badge for deleting 1 Billion, another for deleting 5 Billion, then 10 Billion, One Hundred Billion, and the top-tier badge of badges, the Trillion Influence/Infamy Destroyer. You would be able to earn progress on any of these badges in one billion inf increments.

 

Badge completionists would hate this, of course, and I would not blame them.

If it were an account wide badge, I wouldn't hate it. I've suffered through a bit of tedium just to accumulate 250 billion. To give it all away for one badge...and then have to reduplicate my efforts x 4, and then reproduce that 5 more times for my other badgers...I'd rather not think about it. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 minutes ago, Ukase said:

If it were an account wide badge, I wouldn't hate it. I've suffered through a bit of tedium just to accumulate 250 billion. To give it all away for one badge...and then have to reduplicate my efforts x 4, and then reproduce that 5 more times for my other badgers...I'd rather not think about it. 

I think there would have to be some scaling.  I would guess that the number of players with even a “mere” 100bn in inf cash on Homecoming is very low.  

[Black_Assassin]

1 hour ago, Ukase said:

If it were an account wide badge, I wouldn't hate it. I've suffered through a bit of tedium just to accumulate 250 billion. To give it all away for one badge...and then have to reduplicate my efforts x 4, and then reproduce that 5 more times for my other badgers...I'd rather not think about it. 

im getting rare roulette RSI just thinking about this

[Andreah]

How about a badge that you rent for one billion inf per week? If you can pre-pay up to a year's worth of it in advance?

[Grouchybeast]

Since we're proposing silly inf sink badge ideas, how about one for opening various numbers of Winter/ATO packs?

[Andreah]

5 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

Since we're proposing silly inf sink badge ideas, how about one for opening various numbers of Winter/ATO packs?

Sure! 10, 100, 1000, 10000, and 100000.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Ooh, ooh, how about one for converters used?

[Andreah]

And how about for total market fees paid?

 

10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000 Millions in fees paid!

[TemporalVileTerror]

Series of Badges for number of items in specific categories Listed for 1 Inf before being sold.

Categories such as:  ATOs.  Purple and PVP Recipes.  Purple and PVP Enhancements.  Converters.

Getting a complete set unlocks an Accolade.

Something like Bash, on a 1/2 hour cooldown, but you have a golden sceptre and it's called "Touch of Midas"

[nihilii]

On 3/17/2021 at 5:07 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

I think there would have to be some scaling.  I would guess that the number of players with even a “mere” 100bn in inf cash on Homecoming is very low.  

I'd love something like a Dutch auction, shared amongst the whole playerbase. The badge starts at 100 billion inf, slowly decreases in price over time. Once someone (anyone) buys the badge, it bumps back to x2 what it currently is.

 

So presumably you'd have a couple of whales buying it for 20B, 10B early on... Then a bunch more people getting it in the 1B range... Then it'd hit an equilibrium point at whatever range is considered affordable enough by many and fits with the demand over whatever interval of time is required for a 2x decrease in price.