Idiots manipulating market

[Snarky]

1 minute ago, arcane said:

Supply and demand dude, prices don’t change only because of nefarious manipulation. Please tell me you understand this high school economics concept. 

No money has ever been “lost” on the stock market either. It just changes hands

 

look, use whatever doctoral level words make you feel  better.  SOMEONE is changing the price and making money.  You get that right?  I mean, “surely you can contemplate the intricacies of the situation?”

[arcane]

1 minute ago, Snarky said:

No money has ever been “lost” on the stock market either. It just changes hands

 

look, use whatever doctoral level words make you feel  better.  SOMEONE is changing the price and making money.  You get that right?  I mean, “surely you can contemplate the intricacies of the situation?”

Sigh. I think we’re back in imaginary Rage RP problems level of logic. Cheers man.

[High_Beam]

Right now Wentworth's looks like a Walmart just before the Hurricane arrives in Florida.

[Snarky]

13 minutes ago, arcane said:

Sigh. I think we’re back in imaginary Rage RP problems level of logic. Cheers man.

You think money disappears on the stock market rather than change hands?

 

you prefer the phrase “market forces apply pressure on price indexes” over “Joe the CEO decided we need to raise the sell price 25% this week, again”

 

You are probably more comfortable with “taking the herd to market” over “ butcher the pigs” as well

 

[GM Impervium]

Okay folks, rein it in a bit. No sense bringing up real-life economic issues when we're all here to ignore that sort of thing for a while.

If one takes an exceptionally BROAD meaning of "manipulating the market", then, that's something we're all guilty of.

Every time you bid for something, you're increasing demand. When you bid low, you're trying to reduce it's going price. When you bid high, you increase it's going price. When you sell items, you're increasing supply, and doing so at a price point you desire. Or, if you vendor things, you're denying other players access to those specific goods (well, not specifically, since, you know, everything's bucketed... but still).

 

But, that's a cheeky way of looking at it, I'll admit. The good news is that this sort of thing will likely be self-correcting in time. Just wait it out until whoever is doing this gets bored?

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by GM Impervium
wording

[Yomo Kimyata]

24 minutes ago, High_Beam said:

Right now Wentworth's looks like a Walmart just before the Hurricane arrives in Florida.

 

This is actually something I've noticed for quite some time.  There seems to be a lot less supply for offer on most things, both finished goods (like yummy crafted PvP IOs) and raw materials (like random yellow recipes).

 

I suspect that's in part due to the fact that chronic marketers like myself are producing a lot less supply.  Personally I've been doing that because, frankly, I don't really have enough time in my day as it is and the profit motive isn't enough to encourage me to keep the shelves stocked like I used to.

[Hedgefund]

At some point last week, yellow salvage went from "normal" prices (as low as 150 inf) to a minimum price of 10,077 inf.

 

Now, I can't query that transaction history nor the current ask/bid prices but over the past ~week the lowest price I've seen is 10,077.  Put a bid for 10,076 and another bid for 10,078.  The former will not fill until this current manipulation has concluded.  The latter will fill soon*.  *soon varying greatly by intraday fluctuations.  So I'm very comfortable surmising there are thousands of bids for 10,077 inf.  Is this the result of some organic supply/demand shift?  Well, I'd need some convincing of that.

[InvaderStych]

42 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

This is actually something I've noticed for quite some time.  There seems to be a lot less supply for offer on most things, both finished goods (like yummy crafted PvP IOs) and raw materials (like random yellow recipes).

 

Yup.

 

Because I am not a big fan of spending my time on the market I took to only putting Rare salvage on the market long, long ago.  Everything else is dumped as vendor trash.  My real time is far more valuable to me than Fake Money Units.

 

Edit: Everything in the spoiler tag is Completely Incorrect Because Stych forgot a rather important detail.

 

Of course as of a few minutes ago there were over 10 million pieces of Uncommon Salvage on the market.  So this Nefarious Market Manipulation theory is asserting that someone committed themselves to 1 million transactions of 10 pieces per at some amount of Fake Money Units greater than 1000 each in order to gobble it all up for the purposes of making more Fake Money Units?

 

Really?

 

1 million repetitions of click and drag or whatever macro/pop-menu trick they've come up with.

 

1 million times.

 

If it can be done in 10 seconds each we're still talking about 10 million seconds, which works out to about 115 days of in-game time just buying up Uncommon Salvage to corner the market.

 

Even if it could be done in 1 second/transaction, the buy-up is still 11 days of in-game time.

 

And that is just the buy-up.  Then they've got to repeat the process to re-list everything.  1 million times.  Then add in the wait time between bid and sale on all those buy-up transactions.

 

Sorry, but I'm just not seeing it. Convince me this could be done several orders of magnitude more quickly - I'm willing to be wrong here. 😄

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by InvaderStych

[Yomo Kimyata]

11 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:

 

Yup.

 

Because I am not a big fan of spending my time on the market I took to only putting Rare salvage on the market long, long ago.  Everything else is dumped as vendor trash.  My real time is far more valuable to me than Fake Money Units.

 

Of course as of a few minutes ago there were over 10 million pieces of Uncommon Salvage on the market.  So this Nefarious Market Manipulation theory is asserting that someone committed themselves to 1 million transactions of 10 pieces per at some amount of Fake Money Units greater than 1000 each in order to gobble it all up for the purposes of making more Fake Money Units?

 

Really?

 

1 million repetitions of click and drag or whatever macro/pop-menu trick they've come up with.

 

1 million times.

 

If it can be done in 10 seconds each we're still talking about 10 million seconds, which works out to about 115 days of in-game time just buying up Uncommon Salvage to corner the market.

 

Even if it could be done in 1 second/transaction, the buy-up is still 11 days of in-game time.

 

And that is just the buy-up.  Then they've got to repeat the process to re-list everything.  1 million times.  Then add in the wait time between bid and sale on all those buy-up transactions.

 

Sorry, but I'm just not seeing it. Convince me this could be done several orders of magnitude more quickly - I'm willing to be wrong here. 😄

 

Of the 10mm+ on offer, approximately 10mm are posted by the devs at a price of 100,000.  That’s been true since HC launched.

[Hedgefund]

Here's a real time current state:

 

The "for sale" number includes the amount seeded by the devs.  Generally that's 10M, which you'll see for all 3 tiers of salvage and super packs.   Some items look to be a bit less than 10M and I'm not sure what that reconciliation is, but the rule of thumb, as I understand it is, 10M is the dev seeded amount, the amount over 10M is the player supplied amount.

 

In the below case there are 2,945 yellow salvage pieces for sale.  There are 47,377 bids.  I'll let someone crunch those numbers for how many clicks and time spent that is, but it's a far far lesser scale than "millions".

 

[InvaderStych]

1 minute ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Of the 10mm+ on offer, approximately 10mm are posted by the devs at a price of 100,000.  That’s been true since HC launched.

 

Yeah.

 

Right when I stepped away from the keyboard I realized that it is probably only the 3000 and change that are actually relevant - which is much more realistic time-wise.

 

I still don't see the effort being made and then someone listing them for a value that far away from the seed cap of 100k though.  A fluctuation to 10k only feels like a lot because the numbers are so small and most of us don't really think of it as anything outside of normal fluctuation since the value is so low.

 

There's a lot more space for someone nefarious to push the prices higher before reaching the seed cap.  This just feels like people being willing to pay an extra digit of their Fake Money.

 

Gonna edit my post though. 😄

 

🤷‍♂️

[Sir Myshkin]

I was being a bit cheeky in my original comment, but I think a bit of clarity is due in this thread. This occurrence with (UC) salvage is not abnormal. I'd suspect the reason it may be sticking out more predominately this year is on the fact that so many people were sequestered last year and looking for other online activities to occupy their time so the typical ups and downs didn't occur like in years prior, creating a bit of a break in the tide.

 

The transition from May into June is the typical time frame of schools shifting into summer programs across the globe, let alone specifically just in the U.S. alone where June-August is the typical gap that students and teachers suddenly have more free time, and the game sees that shift/spike. We also often get one (or more) individuals who attempt to manipulate or control the salvage market for a short while without fully understanding its dynamics. Between these two things we have three things happening in stride: new marketeers, an influx of new players consuming salvage stock at a slightly higher rate, and a short-term reduction in salvage production as those who typically had been heavily playing tend to break during the summer season (vacations and the like).

 

Experienced player activity goes down reducing salvage production.

New player activity goes up increasing salvage demand.

Insurgence of new players brings new marketing attempts that create abnormal trends.

 

This will all be washed over in a few months. Promise.

[tidge]

I have not really been paying attention to the AH for a while except as part of an effort to equip a new character that was leveling up. I did my major marketing a long time ago, so while I no longer accumulate Inf as before, I do market with new characters to be able to afford the next characters' build(s).

 

I did notice that some 'mid tier' enhancements we're at higher (stable) prices than they had been 6 months ago... But nothing too crazy. I never noticed uncommon salvage, but converter prices have held steady at a higher (but not unreasonable) price than I expected. Some very rare and HO pieces have jumped (in my eyes).

 

As we discussed long ago, uncommon salvage is a unique (potential) pinch-point because of the very many different ways to use it, the relative infrequency of drops (it isn't an order of magnitude more rare than common) and the seed price (which is orders of magnitude higher than the relative rarity would otherwise indicate.)

[Ironblade]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

No money has ever been “lost” on the stock market either. It just changes hands

That's actually not true.  If you buy a stock and the stock price declines, you have lost money.  No one is making money unless someone expected the decline and shorted the stock.  If a company goes bankrupt, many people have lost money.

 

Many people believe that the stock market is a 'zero sum game' where someone must lose for someone else to win.  This is not the case.  If I recall, futures and options are zero sum.  The stock market is not.  Over time, the stock market goes up and up and many people 'win' with no one (or few) people losing.

[Shred Monkey]

I confess, I haven't followed this discussion at all.  But since I clicked on the topic and got sucked and I thought about how I would do this if I were the type of guy who does this stuff.  (I'm not that kind of guy, but I like a good puzzle)

 

He's what I'd do:

 

1. Download a bot program that replicates clicks on the screen.  (I've never done it for CoH, but I've done it in other games).

2. Teach script A to bid a hair over 10K  for 10 yellow salvage.  Teach script B to get purchases from the AH.  And teach Script C program to delete my salvage.

3. Set up a timer to trigger script B, then C, then A every 15 minutes or so (I'll would tweak the time later).

4. Start with a 10 stacks of bids as a buffer, start the timer, and go AFK.

 

If I felt real nasty, I'd also have a 2nd account for afk farming inf and mailing it to the 1st account, then and add script D to collect the inf I mailed myself.   I've also never AFK farmed, but I wouldn't be surprised if one farmer could keep up with the yellow salvage market.

 

 

 

 

[Snarky]

30 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

That's actually not true.  If you buy a stock and the stock price declines, you have lost money.  No one is making money unless someone expected the decline and shorted the stock.  If a company goes bankrupt, many people have lost money.

 

Many people believe that the stock market is a 'zero sum game' where someone must lose for someone else to win.  This is not the case.  If I recall, futures and options are zero sum.  The stock market is not.  Over time, the stock market goes up and up and many people 'win' with no one (or few) people losing.

If you buy a stock at one price and sell it at a different price (higher or lower) then you have made or lost that amount.  But the other party then has the chance to buy/sell the same item.  The stock may change hands hundreds of times.  Each owner making a profit or loss.   But the money is not LOST.  It keeps switching hands.  When you lose $100 on a stock the money does not disappear from the economy. If people keep bidding more on the item that is where the cash comes from.  When people sell it for less they lose their cash.  (Think pyramid scheme or bitcoin) But the funds are traceable transaction by transaction as to who is putting money into the stock and who is taking money from the stock.  

Edited June 16, 2022 by Snarky

[Snarky]

after re reading the last page i begin to suspect 1 of 2 things are happening

 

1) i am trying to dialogue with the bottom 50% of the population in terms of understanding things

2) i am being trolled in an effort to get a response

 

since the last time i was rebuked by a GM i took a 6 month break from CoH I am going to stop posting on all the boards for a while.

 

some rejoice, some mourn, most go on wondering wtf

 

anyways, i am a busy old vampire with little energy to educate and/or be vexed.

 

good night

[Ironblade]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

But the money is not LOST.  It keeps switching hands.  When you lose $100 on a stock the money does not disappear from the economy.

Actually, it does.  If I buy a stock and the stock price declines, that represents a reduction of the entire company's market capitalization.  The entire company has lost value and every shareholder has lost some money.  No one has gained.  When a company goes bankrupt, the value drops to zero (or close to zero).  Every shareholder has lost money.

 

If we have a market crash where most companies lose a portion of their value THE ENTIRE ECONOMY HAS SHRUNK.  Value (money) is lost.  Gone.

[Troo]

2020, 390+ replies.. Let's see if we can beat it!

 

Edited June 17, 2022 by Troo

[Troo]

12 hours ago, InvaderStych said:

I still don't see the effort being made and then someone listing them for a value that far away from the seed cap of 100k though.  A fluctuation to 10k only feels like a lot because the numbers are so small and most of us don't really think of it as anything outside of normal fluctuation since the value is so low.

 

There's a lot more space for someone nefarious to push the prices higher before reaching the seed cap.  This just feels like people being willing to pay an extra digit of their Fake Money.

 

Yeah, with 2,945 uncommon for sale, it is the 47,377 bids which is unusual and the issue.

 

 

 

If you don't believe folks put in that many bids, craft or convert at that scale, or have that kind of cash to burn.
 

Spoiler

 

On 1/4/2022 at 6:16 AM, Ukase said:

It's not unheard of for me to go through 3000 converters a day. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. 

On 9/6/2020 at 8:03 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

At some point last spring/summer, someone apparently put in a cap at 5,000 inf for commons overnight.  I bought thousands there, maybe ten thousands, trying to lift the cap, and assumed that the devs had lowered the seeding level from 10k to 5k.  They assure me the cap was not changed, so I now assume that those offers are still out there around that level.

 

"spoken in DMs about our differing strategies, but we're both quite happy with our ways of doing things, and arguably, the net result is the same, or very close to it. I think we're both at about 300Billion, give or take 5. And I'm fairly certain there are some that have quite a bit more than that - just have no idea who they are."

 

 

Edited June 17, 2022 by Troo

[MoonSheep]

i logged on last night and tried manipulating the price of alchemical gold to see if the prices could be influenced to a significant degree - i was quickly 160M inf down and didn’t seem to make much of a difference on that one item (didn’t want to waste too much inf on an experiment)

 

if someone is trying to manipulate the price of all uncommon salvage they will be having to invest 10’s of billions into doing it

 

i think it may simply be a wider market force

 

edit: just seen @Troo’s  post, looks like i’m a right peasant. please ignore the above post from this lowly proletariat 😀

Edited June 17, 2022 by MoonSheep

[Troo]

oopsie

[High_Beam]

19 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

This is actually something I've noticed for quite some time.  There seems to be a lot less supply for offer on most things, both finished goods (like yummy crafted PvP IOs) and raw materials (like random yellow recipes).

 

I suspect that's in part due to the fact that chronic marketers like myself are producing a lot less supply.  Personally I've been doing that because, frankly, I don't really have enough time in my day as it is and the profit motive isn't enough to encourage me to keep the shelves stocked like I used to.

Wentworth's is now claiming global supply chain issues due to COVID.  This is sounding more and more like a Nemesis plot.

[cohRock]

If $10,000+ uncommon salvage bothers you, the issue is easy to sidestep.  Run one AE mission set to Mission Architect rewards.  You'll still get normal xp, but the drops are replaced with Mission Architect tickets.  One medium length mission will likely give you over 1000 tickets.  Among the many things you can redeem the tickets for is uncommon salvage for 80 tickets each.  I think rare salvage is 300 tickets, and a random common salvage is just 8.

 

See: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Ticket

 

Following my advice, I found a great Dev Choice arc -- excellent story.  It is #3408, The Golden Age of the Paragon Society. AE can be far more than a place to mindlessly farm.

Edited June 17, 2022 by cohRock

[InvaderStych]

8 hours ago, Troo said:

Yeah, with 2,945 uncommon for sale, it is the 47,377 bids which is unusual and the issue.

 

See.  This is the sort of stuff people should be posting.  Not "Grr.. Me Mad Because Market Look Wrong!!!" "You R Stupid!" "REALWORLDECONOMYNOOB" and whatever other nonsense has been going on in this thread. 😄

 

8 hours ago, Troo said:

If you don't believe folks put in that many bids, craft or convert at that scale, or have that kind of cash to burn.

 

Re-read my edit which happened minutes after my post.  In the thousands of transactions. Sure.

 

In the tens of millions under my "Stych briefly forgets something really important about seeded items on the market scenario," still no not really.

 

But what I would expect to see is something closer to this if there was true manipulation occuring:

 

6 hours ago, Troo said:

oopsie

 

[Edited after looking at pricing as of this morning.]

 

Back down to 50k.  Nice try though. 👍

 

😄

 

So, we have a seasonal pricing spike. A big thread arguing about it, and now the Stock Market Simulator crowd has jumped in to "Show Us What They Can Do."

 

😄

Edited June 17, 2022 by InvaderStych