Price of enhancements

[ForeverLaxx]

4 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

I see a some people giving me a thumbs down for my ideas on stopping flipping.  Given that they haven't replied to me I can only assume that either they lack the imagination to come up with ideas of their own, or they make their living in CoH by flipping.

 

 

Just for you, so you're not left in the dark (and to help you out), I'm going to reply to this bait to inform you that creating some arbitrary "if people don't agree then they obviously are lacking X or doing Y thing" doesn't really mean anything.

 

I posted something in another "market price" thread that will be similar to what I'm about to post here now. My extent of using the market is to quick-sell just about everything. That includes in-demand recipes/enhancements I don't have a use for on a character, merits, salvage I don't need, etc. I buy what I need from the AH, craft the thing, and slot it. My interaction with the AH is about as minimal as it can get without flatly ignoring it. I say this because I "thumbed down" your post despite not being an AH flipper and not "lacking the imagination" to come up with my own idea.

 

What you're doing is inventing a solution in search of a problem. Flipping is not a problem. Flipping takes the glut of unwanted IOs and changes them into wanted IOs that net the person willing to put in the work (and the tiny bit of risk) some profit. Flipping on the scale of "buy at 1, sell at 50mill" just doesn't happen unless someone gets really lucky after leaving low bids for months or someone else just keys in the wrong value and makes a purchasing mistake. None of this is an issue that needs "fixing."

 

Don't propose solutions to non-problems. You're only hurting everyone in your crusade against something you, based on bad information, personally dislike.

Edited August 22, 2021 by ForeverLaxx

[Andreah]

6 hours ago, Triumphant said:

There are exactly two ways you could get me to stop doing this:

 

1) Adjust the Auction House so that it isn't possible to get millions for selling something for 1 inf (Dev's would have to do this).

2) Completely remove the market and make everything free (Again, Dev's would have to do this).

 

I think there's a missing option:

 

3) Delete the Auction house, email system, character to character trading system, off-character storage, and character bind all drops on pick-up. Nothing is free; everything is earned from play of that character and that character alone.

 

There's probably lots of other ways too.

 

Most of them are really bad. 

 

As far as the auction house, I like how it is structured at present, because it puts a little strategy and thought into it. If others don't like that, they don't have to use it. Just sell drops to vendors, save them in email or storage for alts and use merits to get the things they actually want. 

 

The auction house has particular bits of hidden information on purpose. If it were a full public market, your listing prices would be public. It would show your IO listed for sale at 1 inf. You would see the lists of bids other people set at their specific price points. You would see the detailed sales history going back some distance in time, and probably daily high/low/average/volume before that. We don't have that kind of market, and I wouldn't want one.

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, Andreah said:

I think there's a missing option:

 

3) Delete the Auction house, email system, character to character trading system, off-character storage, and character bind all drops on pick-up. Nothing is free; everything is earned from play of that character and that character alone.

 

There's probably lots of other ways too.

 

Most of them are really bad. 

 

As far as the auction house, I like how it is structured at present, because it puts a little strategy and thought into it. If others don't like that, they don't have to use it. Just sell drops to vendors, save them in email or storage for alts and use merits to get the things they actually want. 

 

The auction house has particular bits of hidden information on purpose. If it were a full public market, your listing prices would be public. It would show your IO listed for sale at 1 inf. You would see the lists of bids other people set at their specific price points. You would see the detailed sales history going back some distance in time, and probably daily high/low/average/volume before that. We don't have that kind of market, and I wouldn't want one.

You can do this.  It is called console gaming.  You obviously are not enjoying the mmorpg experience

 

seriously though.  Find a crew, start running activity you enjoy and soon you will be swimming in Inf. Then this entire thread will seem like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin 

[skoryy]

10 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

I see a some people giving me a thumbs down for my ideas on stopping flipping.  Given that they haven't replied to me I can only assume that either they lack the imagination to come up with ideas of their own, or they make their living in CoH by flipping.

 

 

 

No, they probably see you as a drama llama spouting bad ideas for attention.  And now I do too.

 

Please go outside.

[Andreah]

1 hour ago, Snarky said:

You can do this.  It is called console gaming.  You obviously are not enjoying the mmorpg experience

 

Who, me? I love the auction as it is and am having a great time.

[Snarky]

2 hours ago, Andreah said:

Who, me? I love the auction as it is and am having a great time.

you love the auction?  your suggestion was to delete the auction...

 

you only delete the ones you love.

[Zhym]

On 8/18/2021 at 7:28 PM, Miss Magical said:

You can easily generate 300 million inf per character as long as you actually enjoy playing the character long-term and know how to convert reward merits to inf. This tidbit is not directly taught in game, but in the nifty "guide for new players" guide in the guides forum. You buy enhancement converters at the rate of 3 converters per merit, and each converter can be sold for between 70 and 75k inf. This gives an inf:merit ratio of about 0.2 million inf per merit after market fees. (You can also buy enhancement boosters or unslotters instead, which have approximately the same conversion factor; I like boosters for large amounts of merits - less clicking). There are ways to get more inf for your merits, a lot more, but this method requires zero knowledge, and is the baseline. And because converters are to easy to supply and have such consistent and large demand, they are traded in vast quantities, and the price is very stable.

This is part of why, when I returned to the game, I was convinced that the economy on Homecoming is completely broken.  The idea that inf earned from fighting crime (or committing crime, for those redside) is completely irrelevant and should be turned off as soon as possible, and that the way to make money was instead to earn some reward merits, use them to get Enhancement Converters, which other people use to convert uncommon enhancements into rare enhancements, which they then sell for even more money, all using a market system that's tangential to the game itself was—well, it didn't seem like an indicator of a healthy economy.  The best way to gain influence as a crime-fighter is not to fight crime, but to play the market?  Oh, and purchasing enhancement sets with reward merits is a really bad idea because they're much less expensive on the market?  So is using an Enhancement Catalyst to attune an enhancement—thanks, again, to the market.  Man, the market messes everything up!

 

Now that I've been playing for a year and a half (have I really been back home that long?), I think the economy is only kind of broken.  I still think that fighting crime should be the best way of generating infamy—it ought to be at least as good at generating influence as converting Reward Merits to cash (and there should be a more straightforward way to do that than playing the enhancement conversion game or selling converters or playing the super-pack lottery).  The prices for recipes at the Merit Vendor could use a re-balancing across the board to reflect actual market prices.  And I'm still trying to figure out why some things sell at the prices they do—for example, why does common salvage ever sell for less than 250 inf on the market given that it can easily be sold to stores for that much?   But as broken as I still think the economy is, it's a good sort of broken that works well for gameplay.

 

Why do I think it's a good sort of broken?  Well, prices have been fairly stable over time, for one thing.  Sure, enhancement converters used to reliably sell for 90k and now they're worth about 70k.  Prices of other things have changed as well.  But there hasn't been rampant inflation or deflation of prices, nor have there been huge fluctuations in prices over short periods.  When rare salvage selling for 600k or so instead of 500k is worth conversation (and when the occasional time that rare salvage sells for $1M is worth a whole lot of conversation), that says the market for rare salvage is remarkably stable.  For at least a year and a half, the prices of most items on the market have been more or less around the same general range.  So something there is working.

 

And if the market breaks the economy, it breaks it in favor of making things cheaper.  "Standard" pricing for ATOs, PVP IOs, purples, etc. is much more expensive than what they actually sell for.  They'd have to be, since they set an effective cap for market prices.  But what amazes me is that prices never get close to those caps.  It's much, much, much cheaper to kit out a character in full IO sets than it was on Live.  That may have escalated character power beyond what classic Live content was designed for, but it also makes it feasible to build butt-kicking powerful characters that are a lot of fun to play, IMO.

 

So, yeah.  I still think it would be great if the path to riches weren't a commonly-known "secret" that has to be explained to new players (who might otherwise think that the way to make money in the game is to, y'know, play the game).  But the Homecoming economy, for all its weirdness...kind of works.

Edited August 22, 2021 by Zhym

[tidge]

17 minutes ago, Zhym said:

 The best way to gain influence as a crime-fighter is not to fight crime, but to play the market? 

[Sovera]

26 minutes ago, Zhym said:

Why do I think it's a good sort of broken?  Well, prices have been fairly stable over time, for one thing.  Sure, enhancement converters used to reliably sell for 90k and now they're worth about 70k.  Prices of other things have changed as well.  But there hasn't been rampant inflation or deflation of prices, nor have there been huge fluctuations in prices over short periods.  When rare salvage selling for 600k or so instead of 500k is worth conversation (and when the occasional time that rare salvage sells for $1M is worth a whole lot of conversation), that says the market for rare salvage is remarkably stable.  For at least a year and a half, the prices of most items on the market have been more or less around the same general range.  So something there is working.

 

And as you said the prices keep up. For sure we used to sell converters for 90-120k, but purples were also worth 24-25 mill. Now we sell them for 70-75k... but the purples are worth 17-18 mill.

 

RL this ain't where converters would drop to 70-75k and purples go up to 30-35 mill.

[Ukase]

15 hours ago, Triumphant said:

Striving for all that money that I can't actually use, doing something I find personally tedious, is just a waste of my time and I don't see why I would bother with it.

 

Fair points. I suppose the only reason I can come up with is you're screwing over all the other folks who also, like you, don't want to fuss with the market. (More precisely, you're allowing marketers to screw over players like yourself who don't want to mess with the market.) What you are doing, however, is making things easy for a guy like me (but isn't me) who routinely puts in lowball bids and relists them for a fair price. So, you do you. It's fine with me. I can buy whatever I want - although I only rarely do. 

I would think it would be just as easy to sell something for the going rate, as opposed to 1 inf. Gosh - typing out a few extra numbers must be terribly difficult and/or time consuming. I'm kidding, of course. You really should play the way you like. Doesn't impact me in the tiniest bit. I just feel badly for the folks who are looking for the very goods you're selling - but they can't find them at a fair price because someone bought them all - and then re-listed them at higher than a fair price. Because your 1 inf sale price allows them to relist it and get a profit. Because of the AH fees being 10%, it's a bit useless for someone to buy something at the fair price, then relist 50% or even 25% higher. They wouldn't sell. But at 1 inf, plenty of room for margin. 

But, I guess I'm figuratively beating a dead horse. Carry on - play your own way. It won't impact my fun, and my way shouldn't impact yours. 

[Ukase]

13 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

 Flipping is not a problem. Flipping takes the glut of unwanted IOs and changes them into wanted IOs that net the person willing to put in the work (and the tiny bit of risk) some profit. Flipping on the scale of "buy at 1, sell at 50mill" just doesn't happen unless someone gets really lucky after leaving low bids for months or someone else just keys in the wrong value and makes a purchasing mistake. None of this is an issue that needs "fixing."

 

Don't propose solutions to non-problems. You're only hurting everyone in your crusade against something you, based on bad information, personally dislike.

I know you mean well, but I think you've missed the mark. 

This is an example of flipping: 

Scenario: There are 27 Preventative Medicine: Absorb Procs on the AH. They are selling for only 2m! I bid on 27 of them at 2m and the bids that get filled - I grab them from the AH and relist them for 3M - which is how much they should be selling for. Who says so? Me. It's a darn good proc in a darn good set and should sell for more than the average rare IO. 

That's flipping. Not converting them into something more popular or in higher demand. Just buying the item, and relisting it at a higher price. 

Now, buying the Preventative Medicine: End/Recharge for 2M and converting it into the Absorb proc and selling for 3M - there's value added there (assuming you want the absorb proc and not the end/recharge) That's not flipping. That's marketing. 

Or buying Cleaving Blows and converting them to Obliterations. Cleaving Blows are generally a "trash" set. Picked up about 10 of them at 200K a pop today, converted to Eradication for a new tank that refused to pay the going price for Eradications. 2m? For a set that doesn't go beyond level 30? Nah. Only takes 6-9 converters - which are pretty much free for me. Used 4, listed the rest for sale as obliterations for the fair price of 2.5-3M, depending on which ones. 

 

 

[Col. Kernel]

16 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

Just for you, so you're not left in the dark (and to help you out), I'm going to reply to this bait to inform you that creating some arbitrary "if people don't agree then they obviously are lacking X or doing Y thing" doesn't really mean anything.

 

I posted something in another "market price" thread that will be similar to what I'm about to post here now. My extent of using the market is to quick-sell just about everything. That includes in-demand recipes/enhancements I don't have a use for on a character, merits, salvage I don't need, etc. I buy what I need from the AH, craft the thing, and slot it. My interaction with the AH is about as minimal as it can get without flatly ignoring it. I say this because I "thumbed down" your post despite not being an AH flipper and not "lacking the imagination" to come up with my own idea.

 

What you're doing is inventing a solution in search of a problem. Flipping is not a problem. Flipping takes the glut of unwanted IOs and changes them into wanted IOs that net the person willing to put in the work (and the tiny bit of risk) some profit. Flipping on the scale of "buy at 1, sell at 50mill" just doesn't happen unless someone gets really lucky after leaving low bids for months or someone else just keys in the wrong value and makes a purchasing mistake. None of this is an issue that needs "fixing."

 

Don't propose solutions to non-problems. You're only hurting everyone in your crusade against something you, based on bad information, personally dislike.

 

No, it's not bait.

 

I'm here for a discussion and exchange of ideas.  People downvoting an idea with no comment does not further the discussion, and leaves me with precisely the opinions I stated above.

 

I have no natural filter, I've learned to have enough filter to keep from being banned.  But life is too short to play word games.  If you don't want to have a discussion then don't have one.  Don't hide behind an emote if you have something you want to say.

 

Edit:  Buying IOs and converting them into something better is NOT flipping.  You have put work into the produce to make it more valuable.  This is good for the market and you've well earned the funds you're going to reap from the increased price.

Flipping is buying something at a low price and immediately reselling it for a higher price.  Also known as scalping and arbitrage, both of which are illegal IRL.

Edited August 23, 2021 by Col. Kernel
Add'l info

[Col. Kernel]

On 8/18/2021 at 7:17 AM, Snarky said:

I was just hoping the OP (and anyone else concerned about high prices) had come away from this with the tools to earn.  I find it incredibly easy to earn a few hundred million. In fact it is sort of automatic at this point.  With a couple days effort (not hard effort, just focused on farming and crafting instead of badging and TFs) I can earn a billion+ Real smooth. 
 

people who are struggling to understand enhancers selling for 1-4 million for average enhancers and 5-20 million for special enhancers have probably not experienced this earning potential 

 

there are guides in marketing and guides in farming and if you ask people like Ukase ( i have seen this) will go over exact strategy with you in game for an hour or more.  I am sure some of the other smart people here would as well.  Dont ask me 1) i am not that clever at it and hate to show my ignorance 2) i aint that nice

 

And that's yet another reason that flipping irritates me.  Inf is easy to come by without messing up the market.

[Col. Kernel]

On 8/21/2021 at 7:01 PM, Bionic_Flea said:

Except I will never buy an enhancement, slot it, then unslot it to sell.  I only slot stuff I intend to use to 50, with small exceptions if the build calls for purples.  I generally do not flip.  What I mostly do is buy cheap receipes, craft, convert, and sell.

 

Assuming others do as you suggest it restricts supply because the IOs have to spend some arbitrary amount of time slotted before it can be sold.

It doesn't restrict supply because they were already on the market.  If it's not possibly to flip them for a decent profit in a timely fashion, they won't be taken off the market by the flipper.

 

If you're buying a recipe and crafting it to sell, that's NOT flipping.  You've added value to the item, and to the market.

[Col. Kernel]

18 hours ago, Triumphant said:

 

Well, you're half right.  I AM lazy.  Not only that, but I'm here to enjoy a comic book super hero game, not nurture my work ethic.

 

I'm not trying to be kind/generous, though.  You're wrong about that one.  If I sell 1 orange invention salvage for 1 influence, I make between 400,000 and 500,000 influence.  If I sell a purple for 1 influence, I make anywhere from 10 to 20 million influence.  I can even sell certain orange recipes for 1 influence and make anywhere from 2 and 10 million inf.  Lastly, I can convert all my reward merits to enhancement converters, sell all the converters for 1 influence each, and make 60k to 70k influence for every one I sell (often hundreds at a time, and they convert at a 3 to 1 ratio).

 

I do this because I think the market is pointless in a game where all assets are free (no paywalls) and the market has no real impact on my roleplay of a superhero/villain.  Crafting recipes is boring.  Working the market is boring.  I don't want to waste my fun time in the game, doing something I personally view as tedious.  Selling everything for 1 influence allows me to make a ton of money without spending 30 minutes interfacing with the market.

 

 

You and I are on the same page up to this point.

[Col. Kernel]

10 hours ago, skoryy said:

 

No, they probably see you as a drama llama spouting bad ideas for attention.  And now I do too.

 

Please go outside.

 

Ad hominems do NOT make you a winner IRL or on the Internet.  Try again.

If you want to have a discussion, tell me WHY my idea is bad.

 

And if you don't want to have a discussion, don't reply to me. 

[Miss Magical]

4 hours ago, Zhym said:

This is part of why, when I returned to the game, I was convinced that the economy on Homecoming is completely broken.  The idea that inf earned from fighting crime (or committing crime, for those redside) is completely irrelevant and should be turned off as soon as possible, and that the way to make money was instead to earn some reward merits, use them to get Enhancement Converters, which other people use to convert uncommon enhancements into rare enhancements, which they then sell for even more money, all using a market system that's tangential to the game itself was—well, it didn't seem like an indicator of a healthy economy.  The best way to gain influence as a crime-fighter is not to fight crime, but to play the market?  Oh, and purchasing enhancement sets with reward merits is a really bad idea because they're much less expensive on the market?  So is using an Enhancement Catalyst to attune an enhancement—thanks, again, to the market.  Man, the market messes everything up!

 

I think you make it sound a lot more convoluted than it really is. For me it felt more like:

• You earn tokens from doing content.
• These tokens can be used to make gold by exchanging for this thing and selling it on the market.

I still make most of my income this way, i.e. actually playing the game, even though I toy with things like opening super packs and recently I started actually using some of my convertors rather than selling them.

 

A lot of what you describe makes intuitive sense to me. In games where you can buy the same item from both players and vendors, buying from players tends to be either cheaper or better, otherwise crafting would be useless. You always check to see if an item is cheaper on the market than on vendors. Being able to re-roll gear or bonuses on gear is also common, though being able to sell the re-rolled item less so - I immediately realized that was a great money-making opportunity the moment I heard of it.

 

 

[ForeverLaxx]

3 hours ago, Ukase said:

This is an example of flipping: 

Scenario: There are 27 Preventative Medicine: Absorb Procs on the AH. They are selling for only 2m! I bid on 27 of them at 2m and the bids that get filled - I grab them from the AH and relist them for 3M - which is how much they should be selling for. Who says so? Me. It's a darn good proc in a darn good set and should sell for more than the average rare IO. 

And there's literally nothing wrong with this. YOU don't set the price anyway: the buyer does. If you think it's worth 3 mil, but never sells at that level, you just bought a bunch at 2 mil for nothing unless you're going to hoard them until you can make that tiny 700k profit (due to the AH cut).

 

I have literally zero problem with this if that's what you want to spend your time doing.

[ForeverLaxx]

51 minutes ago, Col. Kernel said:

 

No, it's not bait.

 

I'm here for a discussion and exchange of ideas.  People downvoting an idea with no comment does not further the discussion, and leaves me with precisely the opinions I stated above.

 

I have no natural filter, I've learned to have enough filter to keep from being banned.  But life is too short to play word games.  If you don't want to have a discussion then don't have one.  Don't hide behind an emote if you have something you want to say.

 

Edit:  Buying IOs and converting them into something better is NOT flipping.  You have put work into the produce to make it more valuable.  This is good for the market and you've well earned the funds you're going to reap from the increased price.

Flipping is buying something at a low price and immediately reselling it for a higher price.  Also known as scalping and arbitrage, both of which are illegal IRL.

It was bait, designed to get people to reply to you. It seemed to have worked.

 

You're not here for discussion, though. You made a statement, decided everyone who disagreed either "lacked imagination" or "must be an evil flipper" and sat around waiting to see who would bite.

 

For that, I'm not responding to you after this. The fact of the matter is, your problem with flippers is just that -- YOUR problem. It's not a problem in the game itself, so stop trying to push a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

[Ukase]

41 minutes ago, ForeverLaxx said:

And there's literally nothing wrong with this. YOU don't set the price anyway: the buyer does. If you think it's worth 3 mil, but never sells at that level, you just bought a bunch at 2 mil for nothing unless you're going to hoard them until you can make that tiny 700k profit (due to the AH cut).

 

I have literally zero problem with this if that's what you want to spend your time doing.

This isn't what I generally do. This is what other folks do.  I don't like doing it because it makes things more difficult for newer players. And while there's technically nothing wrong with it, it doesn't pass my smell test. But, as long as people are anti-market and in a rush and are willing to take whatever they get by selling for 1 inf, this will continue to happen. 

I was just giving a vocabulary lesson on the distinction between flipping and value-added converting/marketing. 

[Col. Kernel]

1 hour ago, ForeverLaxx said:

It was bait, designed to get people to reply to you. It seemed to have worked.

 

You're not here for discussion, though. You made a statement, decided everyone who disagreed either "lacked imagination" or "must be an evil flipper" and sat around waiting to see who would bite.

 

For that, I'm not responding to you after this. The fact of the matter is, your problem with flippers is just that -- YOUR problem. It's not a problem in the game itself, so stop trying to push a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

 

How is it only my problem that people are artificially inflating the market?  It seems to me that activity affects everyone who uses the market.

 

And I am indeed here for a discussion.  I have posted an idea, been given a non-verbal response saying it's a bad idea, so I asked WHY it's a bad idea.  No one has yet bothered to respond to me.

 

I can defend my position, yet it seems that people with an opposing position are unable to defend theirs.  So far you have conflated adding value and relisting with the value increased as flipping, despite flipping (aka scalping and arbitration) being defined not once or by only one person, but at least 3 times by no fewer than 2 people.

 

Given that you have taken the field, failed to actually address the issue at hand, and now wish to retire, I can only think that you do not have a valid argument to make either for or against flipping, or against any detail of the idea I have presented.  You obviously have a position, given that you awarded me negative fake internet points, yet you have declined to state your position.  Since you lack the intestinal fortitude to state your position, and don't like speculation, everyone else can decide where you stand for themselves.

[Bionic_Flea]

10 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

No one has yet bothered to respond to me.

Since you consider me no one, I too will abandon further discussion on this topic.  Be well.

[Col. Kernel]

3 hours ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Since you consider me no one, I too will abandon further discussion on this topic.  Be well.

 

You've known me for much longer than I've been on HC, Flea.

 

That was not directed at you.  Please accept my apologies if you honestly think it was.  The context of my comment was that the people who put the downvotes but no reason for the downvotes were stifling the conversation rather than engaging in it.

 

Given the quality of the replies from the one downvoter, I guess they truly did not have anything to say.  Makes me wonder why people on a discussion board don't want to have a discussion though.

[SeraphimKensai]

Regarding the price of enhancements, I think we can all agree that we are happy we don't have to pay Live Prices. How annoying was it to make a toon and need 5-6x the influence cap to actually IO it out?

 

Most toons here are about 200-500m and we're done. And as others have pointed out it's pretty easy to get influence (mind you I wouldn't mind a temp power to shut off xp and double influence gains the reverse of the 2xp power).

[Ukase]

3 hours ago, SeraphimKensai said:

(mind you I wouldn't mind a temp power to shut off xp and double influence gains the reverse of the 2xp power).

Have you made this suggestion? I get the devs turned it off, based on their perception of a gap growing between the farmers and those who don't, but a temp power that didn't work in AE might be okay with the HC dev team.