The Elephant In the Room : Enhancement Converters

[jubakumbi]

Anyway, why does everything have to have a point?

 

Words to live by.

[Karthunk]

Then what is the point in having rare recipe drops?

 

To make them and use them?

 

 

Why would you spend more infamy on crafting them then just buying them directly from the market?

[Coyotedancer]

Converters, salvage bucketing and less ridiculous merit prices effectively kill "Market PvP" dead... and that's a *good thing* for most of the player base. You know, those of us who want to play City of Heroes instead of City of Marketeering.

It didn't kill it at all, it just changed it. You can still easily make billions of inf marketeering, although the nature of how you make that inf has changed. Crafting is no longer profitable (for most items, there are some exceptions) but crafting and converting is still very profitable. Flipping is also still profitable on at least some items.

 

Honestly the main change is that the relative scale has changed. Prices are, roughly speaking, about 10% of what they were on live so while the profit margin is still there for those who want it the overall prices are more affordable for people who don't want to market.

Basic marketeering isn't what falls under "Market PvP" and you know it.

I would consider any form of buying items with the intent of reselling to be a form of Market PvP. What definition do you use?

 

Market manipulation was the aspect of it that personally bothered me the most back in the retail days. Someone mentioned Luck Charms upthread, as an example of how easy it was to "corner" a particular piece of the market where supply was an issue, and so artificially drive up the price on that item or component beyond what basic demand might, sometimes to fairly ludicrous levels.

 

I knew people who did that on a regular basis, and while I considered it a really dick move they thought it was both a great way to make INF and a hilarious way to "win" the marketeering game... They're the ones who introduced me the term "Market PvP" in the first place. 

 

Me? I'm a crafter and enjoy playing around to find out what sells at a good profit and what doesn't. I have no issue with other crafters or people who like converting to raise returns. Flippers are a little assholeish in my opinion, but that's a carry-over from the way I look at flipping in the real world and I know that with bucketing and market seeding there's only so much they can do to drive up pieces here, so to each their own on that. 

[Jaguaratron]

Something needs to be done about enhancement converters changing uncommon enhancements into rare enhancements. As it currently stands there are some popular "rare", not sure how they can be called rare anymore, enhancements are selling for cheaper than it cost to make from the recipe. Why, you might ask? Well it's far cheaper to make an uncommon of a set and spend two enhancement converters to change it to a rare.

 

Please fix this! I want a game with a healthy market, as it currently stands people are going to get bored fast when they can fully outfit a hero/villan with little effort in rares.

 

This is a terrible suggestion. If you don't want it to be easy, then set up some sort of artificial restrictions on yourself instead of asking for it to be forced on everyone else.

 

He doesnt want it easy, he wants to Dr Doom the market

 

 

Not sure what you mean by Dr. Doom the market. I never said that I want 1bil infamy enhancements or for the market to get where people can corner it, but a popular rare enhancement should be at least profitable to make from a recipe.

 

That sounds reasonable.

 

Lets see, if you have recipe drop, and the materials already then all it costs you the crafting fee and therefore you are likely make a profit.

 

If you dont have the right rare materials on you but you have other rare materials you can sell those and buy what you need and it basically will just cost you the crafting fee and therefore you are likely to make a profit.

 

If you dont have a rare salvage to use/trade go play game for an hour or two and you will get one, or trade 5 merits for one or trade some AE tickets for one.

 

[jubakumbi]

Why would you spend more infamy on crafting them then just buying them directly from the market?

 

Because I have all the stuff needed to make the IO, I want it and I am in my base crafting stuff?

 

I realize your question now revolves around 'the most efficient applicaiotn of resources' and again, i am here to play a (super)hero, not try and ROI everything, after another hour of playtime, I will have more stuff, what purpose does the stuff I aquire have other than to be used?

 

The object of the game, IMO, is not to accumulate wealth or use it 'efficiently' it's simply to andvance over time and get a better set of stuff, I have plenty in RL to worry about ROI, I don't do that in games.

[Sothoth]

Then what is the point in having rare recipe drops?

 

To make them and use them?

 

 

Why would you spend more infamy on crafting them then just buying them directly from the market?

 

Crafting badges...

[Adeon Hawkwood]

Market manipulation was the aspect of it that personally bothered me the most back in the retail days. Someone mentioned Luck Charms upthread, as an example of how easy it was to "corner" a particular piece of the market where supply was an issue, and so artificially drive up the price on that item or component beyond what basic demand might, sometimes to fairly ludicrous levels.

You know I see this bought up a lot and I seriously question how often it actually happened. Yes you got occasional spikes in the price of low-volume items like Luck Charms but it was pretty much impossible to tell the difference between someone trying to spike the price versus a random blip in the regular supply and demand (which also happened quite a bit). When that sort of thing happened I just put bids in at normal prices and they'd generally fill overnight (or even in a few hours). So if people were trying to corner the market they weren't really doing a very good job. Sure you might be able to spike the price for a few hours and maybe you could even make a profit doing so but I never really considered it to be a serious problem.

 

Heck I spiked the price of items from time to time simply because I was buying a bunch of something and wasn't super concerned about price. A lot of items had a relatively thin "skin" of reasonably priced items (which had high turnover) and a larger inventory of high priced stuff that people had either listed "just in case" or were old bids that had been forgotten. A sudden spike in demand could easily burn through the skin items and start digging into the reserve.

[Shinobu]

The thrust of this whole thread is really this:  in the old days you could be excited when you got a rare recipe, because you could probably craft it and sell it for a profit.

 

The new reality is:  there's a good chance your rare recipe will sell for a loss if you craft it to sell it.  But you can still craft it to use, and certain recipes are still worth crafting to sell, and if you use converters yourself then getting common recipes is actually better than getting that rare recipe.

 

Also, getting a PvP recipe or a Purple recipe is still a very good thing.

 

You just need to adjust your perspective on what is a good thing to get as a random drop.  ^_^

 

 

[Shinobu]

Market manipulation was the aspect of it that personally bothered me the most back in the retail days. Someone mentioned Luck Charms upthread, as an example of how easy it was to "corner" a particular piece of the market where supply was an issue, and so artificially drive up the price on that item or component beyond what basic demand might, sometimes to fairly ludicrous levels.

You know I see this bought up a lot and I seriously question how often it actually happened.

 

Quite a bit, based on the stories from Marketeers on the forums and what I observed.  But also people tended to conflate the issue because it annoyed them that one time, so it always sounded like an even bigger issue than it probably was.

 

 

[Karthunk]

Market manipulation was the aspect of it that personally bothered me the most back in the retail days. Someone mentioned Luck Charms upthread, as an example of how easy it was to "corner" a particular piece of the market where supply was an issue, and so artificially drive up the price on that item or component beyond what basic demand might, sometimes to fairly ludicrous levels.

You know I see this bought up a lot and I seriously question how often it actually happened.

 

Quite a bit, based on the stories from Marketeers on the forums and what I observed.  But also people tended to conflate the issue because it annoyed them that one time, so it always sounded like an even bigger issue than it probably was.

 

Someone was doing it last night with common crafting mats, on torch, but it wasn't that big of a deal as a few hours later it sorted itself out.

 

[MunkiLord]

 

Heck I spiked the price of items from time to time simply because I was buying a bunch of something and wasn't super concerned about price. A lot of items had a relatively thin "skin" of reasonably priced items (which had high turnover) and a larger inventory of high priced stuff that people had either listed "just in case" or were old bids that had been forgotten. A sudden spike in demand could easily burn through the skin items and start digging into the reserve.

 

A few weeks ago when I was running farms with my Scrapper without IOs I had constant bids out on Good Lucks and Dramatic Improvements and I'm pretty sure I single handily made those prices spike for a week or so.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

 

Heck I spiked the price of items from time to time simply because I was buying a bunch of something and wasn't super concerned about price. A lot of items had a relatively thin "skin" of reasonably priced items (which had high turnover) and a larger inventory of high priced stuff that people had either listed "just in case" or were old bids that had been forgotten. A sudden spike in demand could easily burn through the skin items and start digging into the reserve.

A few weeks ago when I was running farms with my Scrapper without IOs I had constant bids out on Good Lucks and Dramatic Improvements and I'm pretty sure I single handily made those prices spike for a week or so.

Was that why they were going for 50K each for a while?

[Machariel]

I have a lot less time to play now than I did 7 years ago when the game was live and I have been really enjoying the lower prices on the market.  As someone who doesn't typically have a dedicated farming setup, it's really nice to be able to say, do a mothership raid or an ITF or something and come out with enough infamy + merits + salvage to buy another few crafted IOs. 

 

 

[Coyotedancer]

Market manipulation was the aspect of it that personally bothered me the most back in the retail days. Someone mentioned Luck Charms upthread, as an example of how easy it was to "corner" a particular piece of the market where supply was an issue, and so artificially drive up the price on that item or component beyond what basic demand might, sometimes to fairly ludicrous levels.

You know I see this bought up a lot and I seriously question how often it actually happened.

 

Quite a bit, based on the stories from Marketeers on the forums and what I observed.  But also people tended to conflate the issue because it annoyed them that one time, so it always sounded like an even bigger issue than it probably was.

 

Well, Ad did pretty much completely ignore the part of my post where I mentioned actually knowing a couple of people who did it for fun and profit.

 

That's inconvenient for the narrative, I guess.

[Roughtrade]

I am a bit of a Market Noob but there seems to be a thing the OP and many posters in this thread are missing.

 

You cannot take a single day's prices as an example of how the market for something is doing.  It's too small of a sample size.  Things have only been going for a month or two, all of which is still too small to really make a prediction on how well or poorly the economics are set up.  Any corrections made now are liable to make things worse for you, not better.

 

Give this thing some time and quit stressing over a single day, or even a single week, of prices. 

[jubakumbi]

Give this thing some time and quit stressing over a single day, or even a single week, of prices.

 

Logic and reason you say?

Patience?

Are you insane?

 

:)

 

[Roughtrade]

Are you insane?

I have a paper signed by three doctors saying "not any more" but thanks for asking!

 

(Insert Smile Emoji Here)

[wjrasmussen]

Right. No more 2 billion Inf PVP recipes. No more people deciding to corner the market on Luck Charms and force players to pay hundreds of thousands of Inf for them. Everything is a lot more affordable to everyone, which means less frustration all around.

 

(Plus, it's remarkably easy to make money by converting. See the guide that GM quote above is pulled from, which I wrote... :) )

 

See, when I see people wanting a healthier market, I always tend to think this is what they want...a market contolled by the big influnce marketeers, forcing us to go uphill both ways to get the goods.

 

I shudder at these kinds of things, because like another poster states, I play the game to be a (super)hero, not to be a money manager and the current state makes it enjoyable - I have to take the time to get/make the IOs, but I don't have to take time out of playing just to earn the stuff to do it, it happens while I play normally.

 

Having to play two games - the market and the Go Hunt Kil Skuls - is not my thing.

My best-man, back in the day, hit the 2B mark in a couple weeks after starting, because he loves numbers, so i get that the market is another game.

I think you are correct.  I think of greed when I read that.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

Well, Ad did pretty much completely ignore the part of my post where I mentioned actually knowing a couple of people who did it for fun and profit.

 

That's inconvenient for the narrative, I guess.

Not really, I know it happened (as I said I did it myself by accident from time to time). But there's a huge difference between "sometimes people spike the price of something for a few hours" and "the market is constantly being manipulated".

 

A lot of people act like the market on live was constantly being inflated by groups or individuals for profit which from what I could see wasn't really the case. Sure people would occasionally spike the price of something but the price would pretty much always return to normal within a few hours. There were also plenty of times that the price skied due to a temporary blip in supply and demand, and personally I suspect that those were more common. So unless you were incredibly impatient (or just didn't care) a spike in prices didn't really impact you.

[Shinobu]

I do know people would do this not just for a few hours, but for days or weeks at a time.  Pick your salvage (we'll just say Luck Charms again), and first you bid-creep until you've bought out the entire stock up to a certain point.  In some cases, people would buy up ALL the stock, just because they could.  (And sometimes a different marketeer would have placed 10 of a common salvage for sale at nearly 2 billion influence per piece, just because they could do that and it would prevent people from buying everything.  And in one case that I remember, the buy still bought everything just to prove their point.  It was all posted on the market forums, heh.)

 

Anyway let's say you think all Luck Charms should sell for 75,000 influence.  Once you've cleared the market of Luck Charms selling for less than that, you can place thousands of bids across multiple characters at 74,000 influence, and list all of the Luck Charms you've bought at 75,000 influence.

 

You will now automatically buy anything listed at 74,000 influence, and force everyone to pay at least 74,001 influence to buy a Luck Charm.  And you can keep doing this for as long as you can afford to, and for as long as you have time to keep checking on your bids to make sure they don't all fill.  But people would figure out what you were doing and flood the market with salvage from their bases, so in the long run it didn't seem very sustainable to me.  I never did it, and it mostly seemed like a mini-game that didn't really result in huge profits or anything, just people screwing with the market because they could.

 

Pretty much impossible to do with the way our market is set up here, since you'd have to buy out ALL common salvage including the millions that were seeded by the GMs (and which they could just reseed if you did somehow buy them all).

[Karthunk]

I am a bit of a Market Noob but there seems to be a thing the OP and many posters in this thread are missing.

 

You cannot take a single day's prices as an example of how the market for something is doing.  It's too small of a sample size.  Things have only been going for a month or two, all of which is still too small to really make a prediction on how well or poorly the economics are set up.  Any corrections made now are liable to make things worse for you, not better.

 

Give this thing some time and quit stressing over a single day, or even a single week, of prices.

 

Stress over? I'm making stupid amounts of infamy turning uncommon enhancements into rare enhancements and i don't plan to stop. What will happen is people, like myself, who are flooding the market with rare enhancements will drive the price into the dirt. Rare recipes will be pure vender fodder. This doesn't require a magic ball to figure out.

 

I want a healthy market and these converters are going to wreck the value of any rare enhancements and the recipes for said enhancements.

[Roughtrade]

Stress over? I'm making stupid amounts of infamy turning uncommon enhancements into rare enhancements and i don't plan to stop. What will happen is people, like myself, who are flooding the market with rare enhancements will drive the price into the dirt. Rare recipes will be pure vender fodder. This doesn't require a magic ball to figure out.

Yah.  You sooo sound like someone who isn’t stressed.

 

Hey, maybe everyone will get rare enhances for all their characters and be happy! 

Wouldn’t that just suck? 

 

Or maybe tomorow the prices will be different because you caused a minor bubble and didn’t break the game as badly as you seem to think you did.

[Shinobu]

If people drive the prices of rare IOs down so much that it makes no sense to craft a rare recipe, then I guess that's what will happen.  It won't be the end of the world.

 

Note that the price of rare salvage is half what it was a few weeks ago, so the costs of crafting your rare recipe are dropping, too.  Also, uncommon crafting costs and the costs of converters set a baseline for how much you can sell the end product for and still make a profit.  If the prices drop too low, people will stop trying to eek out a profit by converting.  Or people will start buying the cheap IOs and flipping them for a higher price.  If enough people stop supplying the market, prices will rise again.  Either way, it should auto correct.

 

The only problem I see is that your rare recipe maybe isn't worth having, but your uncommon recipe is more valuable.  /shrug.

[Mr. Vee]

On a side note, those highly prized rare recipes still sell for pretty good money without crafting.

[Robotech_Master]

Most rare recipes are vendor trash, with the exception of a relative few, like Luck of the Gambler, that do still command high prices.

 

I think that no matter how low prices get, there will still be room to turn a profit on conversion crafting, just because buying an Attuned IO can be less expensive than crafting and Attuning one yourself, but still pay more than it costs to craft and convert an Uncommon one to it.