Fifty Billion Worth of Chaos: A Market Thought Experiment

[Yomo Kimyata]

I’m unconcerned with the number of items for sale (unless that number is zero). I am concerned about the flow of demand and supply over a given time period.  It’s been clear to me for a long time that the dynamics of HC are of gradually waning demand and consistent supply.

 

I mean, does it really matter how many Peroxisomes there are in the AH if you can’t find a use for them in a build?  

[Andreah]

2 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

It’s been clear to me for a long time that the dynamics of HC are of gradually waning demand and consistent supply

I believe that. 

 

The number of new characters and new builds being made for them will trend downward. 

 

But the development teams mixing things up and causing us to rethink our builds keeps demand up. 

 

And there are a few players who will make new alts forever. 

 

Maybe we should have a chance of a slotted enhancement being destroyed when we're defeated?  (For the record, I say NO. )

[Troo]

14 hours ago, Andreah said:

Maybe we should have a chance of a slotted enhancement being destroyed when we're defeated?

 

I'm not against this idea.

 

[Troo]

@Yomo Kimyata Do you really feel things are gradually waning?

We definitely have swings.

To me it has felt like many or most folks are just doing the same thing. More and more concentrated on specific needs.

Things that are popular are really popular while other things just aren't.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Yes, I do.  Not DOOM levels, but when I periodically check flows of IOS that I consider “staples”, I feel like we have about 1/3 of the demand we had about 18 months ago.  

[Sirius.Games]

7 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Yes, I do.  Not DOOM levels, but when I periodically check flows of IOS that I consider “staples”, I feel like we have about 1/3 of the demand we had about 18 months ago.  

The downward trend makes sense, things sold faster 18 months ago however it would make sense that because prices have stayed relatively stable supply has tapered. I convert when I need to finance a build but have gotten to the point of having 5 of every IO over 3 million is in my base. I'm nearing saturation and don't have as much desire to put up 100s of converted IOs a day. 

 

Supply will lag behind slowing with demand but supply will also ebb, else we will see the market crash and all IOs trend to less than the material cost.

 

The market seems stable with everything around the same prices volume has constricted however but not to a point of IOs not selling within a day.

 

As for how to disrupt the market the target would have to be both limited supply and a niche.

 

The only items that fit that category I'm aware of are HOs. You have to go out of you way to get them and I don't believe there is a ceiling seed. You could only target a single type but it would could make them them more unviable for purchase.

[Mopery]

Any unregulated free market inevitably leads to monopolies.

 

I like the way the HC Auction House works, it creates far fewer problems than it solves.

[Bionic_Flea]

27 minutes ago, Mopery said:

Any unregulated free market inevitably leads to monopolies.

 

You can't have a monopoly when the supply literally just appears by magic.

[Mopery]

3 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

You can't have a monopoly when the supply literally just appears by magic.

*Looks at Microsoft's license agreement*

Edited January 18, 2022 by Mopery

[MoonSheep]

back on live i used to waste 100-200m buying up all the alchemical gold/silver to create some chaos for a few hours, it was always short lived though

 

sometimes i’d try to build an IO only to find a mundane piece of uncommon salvage was now 100k+, was always nice to see i was not the only one embracing anarchy

[Yomo Kimyata]

I've been thinking about the possibility of a "drive the converter market higher" strategy.  At this point, between merits and converters in Character Items and on various accounts, I'd estimate I've got the equivalent of about 100k converters, so I'm not going to sweat it.  But then I started wondering how price elastic the converter market is?  If prices went to 100k consistently, I'd probably still buy them on the market.  If they went to 333,333 (the equivalent price if you buy converters by buying merits for 1mm a pop), I'd draw down on my stash.  But I'm not sure where I would start selling converters.  Maybe at 500k?  And that would just be an arbitrage play (buy 300 converters for 100mm inf, sell them for 150mm gross and 135mm net).  But even then I feel I'd get better value out of using the converters directly. 

[Andreah]

That's an interesting thought.

 

I use converters, and I calculate the the expected number of them to get from starting point A to final point B, and how much the list price needs to be, and compare that to the typical price B sells at to set my listing points. There are some conversion chains that would no longer be profitable at the prevalent sales price if the price of converters rose enough. Which B's are those for given converter price levels? An interesting question. 

[Ukase]

As we all know, supply and demand will impact prices. But I don't think the perception of waning demand is a bad thing. Isn't it possible that people are finally comprehending what folks like Flea, myself and others have been telling them in the help channel? 

That if you want the LotG 7.5% and don't want or can't afford the 7M price tag, simply get a substitute good and convert it.

I don't know that the HC metrics track new accounts. That would be a curious number. But, I would venture that new accounts wouldn't be our customers, at least, not initially. They'll likely be level 15 or so before they even get an invention recipe. Maybe a bit earlier, depends on how much attention they're paying to drops. 

Most folks don't even mess with IOs until 50 - which is a bit surprising to me with the ease of acquiring attuned enhancements. But, I guess since below 25-30 they don't really do as much as SOs, that's reason enough to at least do without them for that long. And it only takes some of these folks a few msrs & some kill most ITFs to get from 30 to 50 with the 2xp buff.

And there's still a few reformed SO only players; players that are finding the IOs make things too easy, so they've just stopped using them, and are going the "Iron Man" route. I certainly only use SOs in most powers until level 30 myself. And when I'm 50, I'm not buying things from the AH, I'm crafting them myself, selling what was crafted and essentially trading for as close to equal value as I can. Buying from myself, in a round-about fashion. So it's not like any new demand is coming from me. 

Let's also not forget that all those packs, in conjunction with the hero packs - that's a few sets of enhancements that may satisfy needs without ever hitting the AH. 

What would be interesting would be to examine something like all the defense IOs and all the defense recipes, all levels and if we had the info, to compare the sales volume of all of them to last year or so. 

[Golden Azrael]

On 12/1/2021 at 7:18 PM, Andreah said:

 

As a for example, with 50 Billion, a player could drive the price of, say, Enhancement Converters up fairly high for a while. How high could it get? What effect would this have? How would the main player base respond?

 

With Pitchforks.

 

Azrael.

[Golden Azrael]

On 1/18/2022 at 5:47 PM, Bionic_Flea said:

 

You can't have a monopoly when the supply literally just appears by magic.

 

What?  Like the 'Bank of America' Fed printing dollars?

 

Azrael.

Edited May 26, 2022 by Golden Azrael

[kito]

I think I would go the outher Way Poor inf into the market over a long time picking up hundreds of thousands of IO's millions of converters Etc. prob take 3-4 years of buying and hording and setting up over thousands of different toons. (as you can only have 200 things in your market at a time i think) then before I leave the game post Everything for 1 inf. Overflooding the market for a year or so in cheap Everything, then when the supply runs out the market would adapt but for how ever long the billions of inf you put into the market might make a decent bit of chaos. with any luck you would have a room full of you Billionaire investor friends all there to help lower the market cost. (and buy things at 1 inf to have it show up how low things are selling for) I think the insane them it would take just to set it all up makes it never worth it, but might be fun to see that Chaos of people filling there inventory up with as many purples as they could get while there only a 1 hoping to make a profit later.

[Zect]

4 hours ago, kito said:

I think I would go the outher Way Poor inf into the market over a long time picking up hundreds of thousands of IO's millions of converters Etc. prob take 3-4 years of buying and hording and setting up over thousands of different toons. (as you can only have 200 things in your market at a time i think) then before I leave the game post Everything for 1 inf. Overflooding the market for a year or so in cheap Everything, then when the supply runs out the market would adapt but for how ever long the billions of inf you put into the market might make a decent bit of chaos. with any luck you would have a room full of you Billionaire investor friends all there to help lower the market cost. (and buy things at 1 inf to have it show up how low things are selling for) I think the insane them it would take just to set it all up makes it never worth it, but might be fun to see that Chaos of people filling there inventory up with as many purples as they could get while there only a 1 hoping to make a profit later.

 

Trying to crash prices on universally popular, high volume items such as purples is just as futile as trying to raise prices. The entire playerbase spent a month farming ToT bosses and only managed to push the price of purples down by 2-3 million. Furthermore, if you sell 1 million purples at 1 inf each, it only takes 1 million inf to buy them all. In other words, even a small amount of resources is able to remove the excess supply you're attempting to flood the market with.

 

I think people generally do not have a sense of scale regarding the market, in the same way that sci-fi writers do not have a sense of scale when writing about space. 50 B may seem a lot to some players, but the amount of goods that passes through the AH each day is likely in the dozens of trillions at least. Considering other features of the Homecoming AH like fungible items and easy availability of convertors, and it should be clear that attempting to effect drastic changes in market prices for any length of time is extremely difficult, especially if you only have 50 billion to work with.

 

(As someone who did market manipulation on live, and continues to do so on Homecoming, I nevertheless think this is a very good thing; the AH here may be less useful for extorting money out of other players, but as a market it's vastly more useful for everyone. The HC market is a great improvement over the one on live.)

 

With that said...

 

If you really want to cause some annoyance - not chaos, but just irritate the playerbase out of spite - with 50 billion, you should buy up all the uncommon salvage and try to raise the price close to 100k. Uncommon salvage is needed to craft literally every single set IO in the game, regardless of rarity. So this is an item that is used in vast quantities, but at the same time is cheap enough you can buy up a lot of it. It's not valuable enough that people will have saved large stocks of it on hand (unlike eg. purples), and is difficult or uneconomical to produce in large amounts using other resources like merits. So that sounds to me like a prime candidate for supply disruption. As we've seen from previous similar discussions, some people will cut off their nose to spite their face if they think it means sticking it to a marketeer, so you may also be able to inflict indirect economic damage if they take time away from more profitable income streams to farm radio missions for uncommon salvage, or something.

[MistressOhm]

I honestly think trying to corner Converters would be like trying to draw water from a well using a sieve.  Because not only are they incredibly cheap to pick up with Merits (1merit=3 converters), they occasionally drop as rewards for defeating mobs.  I usually get two, sometimes three per mission arc, or a couple while street sweeping or doing tips.  You -might- be able to drive the price up (especially by bidding high and making the trending price climb) but you're not going to be able to corner that market. 

 

What you WOULD end up doing is making sale of those converters more lucrative for the rest of us, so... please proceed, sir.  🙂 

[lemming]

On 11/22/2022 at 2:42 PM, Zect said:

If you really want to cause some annoyance - not chaos, but just irritate the playerbase out of spite - with 50 billion, you should buy up all the uncommon salvage and try to raise the price close to 100k. Uncommon salvage is needed to craft literally every single set IO in the game, regardless of rarity. So this is an item that is used in vast quantities, but at the same time is cheap enough you can buy up a lot of it. It's not valuable enough that people will have saved large stocks of it on hand (unlike eg. purples), and is difficult or uneconomical to produce in large amounts using other resources like merits. So that sounds to me like a prime candidate for supply disruption. As we've seen from previous similar discussions, some people will cut off their nose to spite their face if they think it means sticking it to a marketeer, so you may also be able to inflict indirect economic damage if they take time away from more profitable income streams to farm radio missions for uncommon salvage, or something.

Didn't someone already do the uncommon salvage disruption?   For awhile 12k was the price one would get for throwing them onto the market.  I forget how long that lasted, but all it did was have me dump a lot of uncommon at the time.  (I tend to dump a bit when my salvage gets full and the base is already full, so it didn't change my actions much)

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 11/22/2022 at 5:42 PM, Zect said:

 

 

I think people generally do not have a sense of scale regarding the market, in the same way that sci-fi writers do not have a sense of scale when writing about space. 50 B may seem a lot to some players, but the amount of goods that passes through the AH each day is likely in the dozens of trillions at least. Considering other features of the Homecoming AH like fungible items and easy availability of convertors, and it should be clear that attempting to effect drastic changes in market prices for any length of time is extremely difficult, especially if you only have 50 billion to work with.

 

(As someone who did market manipulation on live, and continues to do so on Homecoming, I nevertheless think this is a very good thing; the AH here may be less useful for extorting money out of other players, but as a market it's vastly more useful for everyone. The HC market is a great improvement over the one on live.)

 

 

This is a really good point -- you can't forget the market is (probably) a lot bigger than you are.  But at the same time, remember that there are only a few thousand active players at this point, so a few outsized actions can have repercussions.  A few months ago, I decided to sell off most of my stash of purple recipes that I had been accumulating on the cheap.  Probably about three thousand more or less.  So I needed to pick up about 10k rare salvage, and not being a complete idiot, put in gradually increasing bids rather than buy it nao at 1mm a piece.  If I didn't get filled overnight, I would increase my bid a bit and try again.  Rare salvage prices went higher.  Was that *because* of my increased demand?  Not really, but other people who are buying lots probably noticed they weren't getting filled either and they bid higher as well and so prices increased.  Then I crafted and again, not being a complete idiot, sold off thousands of purples relatively slowly.  Under 100 a day.  The worst thing I could have done would be to sell them all at 1 inf.  The second worst thing would have been to offer them all at once at a given price.  Again, other people noticed and gradually started dropping their offer prices.  And again, we ask, was that *because* of me?  Probably not, but people notice they aren't selling at their old prices and relist.  And frankly, maybe this has nothing to do with me at all!  But I notice when flows are greater or less than usual, and I have to assume that others are doing the same thing.

[Bionic_Flea]

Moral of the story:  Blame Yomo.