Implement more measures to curve market manipulation.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

I don't have any issues with the market but, wouldn't an easier fix for market manipulation be allowing auctions to expire like after 10 days or so? (or 2 weeks i dunno the timeframe doesn't matter)

[srmalloy]

If someone wants to keep an auction slot occupied with an outrageously-priced item in the hope that someone sporting the sort of scorch marks on their tights caused only by the spontaneous combustion of huge wads of inf, that's no skin off my nose, and if someone has such a 'gotta have it now' attitude that they're willing to pay it, that's their choice. Putting in a reasonably-priced bid and being willing to wait a few days is more beneficial. As I see it, the only problem that really needs to be fixed with the AH is killing the bug that keeps mixing up bid history, so what you see for an item's history may not be for that item.

[Arc-Mage]

8 hours ago, crimson72 said:

I’ll use an example.  A luck of the gambler defense/recharge 7.5% typically goes for around 6m, no?  Let's just say that's the average price for that item.  Now, someone shows up and posts a 12m tag on it, they have to put up 50% instead of 10%, or 6 million just to post it.  Meaning nobody would realistically ever put up an item for double the going market rate.  And people attempting to do this could be given some sort of notification.  

 

Also, I think information about the average price paid for a given item over a longer period than the last 5 sales of the item should be given to the player.  It's a better context as to what the true average price might be.  For all I know the last 5 items sold are lowball, or extraordinarily high, and I've got no info to help me know the difference.  

Why do I have the impression you are not talking advantage of all the types of money in the game? 
 

Merits! Use Merits. You will greatly reduce the amount of Inf you spend if you supplement your buying habit with Merits. Spending that extra $10 million Inf for a rare isn’t as big of a deal if you are using Merits for over 50% of your build. 

[SwitchFade]

I'm so glad someone made a thread like this, so I could come along and say... OP.......

 

I'm sorry, that's not how economics works.

 

Coma inducing textwall assault can prove it, but, other forumites may appreciate if you just trust me on this one...

 

Really... Not how economics works.

[Greycat]

There are helpful things that could be done with the market.  Fixing the display issues for prices, being able to see more than the last 5, being able to pull up a graph with months of sales to compare. Those'd be useful.

 

The increased fees if your price is "too high?" You're already paying more, which is annoying if you accidentally add another digit, or (as I've seen from some newbies) think you're selling 10 DigiWidgits for a total of 1,000,000 when you're listing them at a million a piece. The fees handle that, on top of items just not selling.

 

Plus, the prices you see are *the prices someone's willing to pay.* If one person lists at 2.5 million for something and it sells, that's because someone had a 2.5 million bid. You'll see that 2.5 million when I list it for 100 inf, too, if that bid is out there waiting. If you think 2.5 million for that thing is too high? Bid less and see if you get it. You might have to wait. Or buy converters or earn merits for it.

 

As far as the low budget fire farming guide? It's still a perfectly fine way to build up cheaply - and given what can drop while farming, you'll make the money to make those builds. Given the flip side is there's no off-market sales of purples for multiple billions like there was on live, that salvage and set IOs are in buckets so you're not seeing wild swings for luck charm vs inanimate carbon rods or something at level 27 vs 35... the market's *much* better and a bit more durable now than it was.

[srmalloy]

2 hours ago, Arc-Mage said:

Merits! Use Merits. You will greatly reduce the amount of Inf you spend if you supplement your buying habit with Merits. Spending that extra $10 million Inf for a rare isn’t as big of a deal if you are using Merits for over 50% of your build. 

You have to look at the cost tradeoff. Many of the more desirable recipes/enhancements have a cost of 100 merits. 100 merits buying 300 convertors and put on the AH should get you 18 to 20 million inf if you're willing to be patient. So if the enhancement is selling for less than that, using the merits for convertors and buying it off the AH is more cost effective. And remember to include the crafting cost for recipes -- most VR recipes require two or three rare components, so that can add another million or million and a half to the cost, plus the ~600k crafting cost. If there aren't any of the specific IO you need in a set, look at the incremental cost of buying another IO in the set and converting it to get the one you want. In most cases, using merits directly won't be your most efficient route, although it is much faster.

[biostem]

19 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

You have to look at the cost tradeoff. Many of the more desirable recipes/enhancements have a cost of 100 merits. 100 merits buying 300 convertors and put on the AH should get you 18 to 20 million inf if you're willing to be patient. So if the enhancement is selling for less than that, using the merits for convertors and buying it off the AH is more cost effective. And remember to include the crafting cost for recipes -- most VR recipes require two or three rare components, so that can add another million or million and a half to the cost, plus the ~600k crafting cost. If there aren't any of the specific IO you need in a set, look at the incremental cost of buying another IO in the set and converting it to get the one you want. In most cases, using merits directly won't be your most efficient route, although it is much faster.

But, you see, this approach does not provide the kind of instant gratification and low low price that the OP wants, so it must be abolished!

[Bionic_Flea]

48 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

You have to look at the cost tradeoff. Many of the more desirable recipes/enhancements have a cost of 100 merits. 100 merits buying 300 convertors and put on the AH should get you 18 to 20 million inf if you're willing to be patient.

 

To the OP:  No, thank you.  Your proposal is to limit supply and the result will be higher prices across the board.

 

There is no sustained market manipulation.  There can't be for several reasons:

 

1) Everyone gets drops just from playing the game.  While someone may be able to buy all the LoTGs +recharge and relist them for 10 million every other player will post their LoTGs for less to undercut the price and get the sale.  So the alleged manipulator would be sitting on his stack of 10 Mill LoTGs because they aren't selling. 

2) If you are unlucky enough to reach the market when only the 10 mill LoTG +recharge are for sale just bid on one of the other pieces in the set, or one of the other defense IOs and use converters until you get what you want. 

3) Alternatively, you could choose to pay the stable and unchanging merit price of 50 merits for the recipe.  As srmalloy suggests, you can value a merit by catalysts, converters, or boosters.  One merit gets you 3 catalysts, which currently sell for about 70K, or 210K/merit; Five merits gets one booster, which sells for a million, or 200k/merit; Twenty merits gets you one Catalyst, which someone is buying at 562K, or the bargain basement price of 28K.  Because of this, there is no IO that goes for much more than 20 million.  The reason it goes above at all is convenience -- someone would rather pay 25 mill now than fuss with exchanging merits and selling whatever.  Oh, and I almost forgot to add the crafting cost and cost of salvage of about 2.5 - 3 mill.  Accordingly, merits set an upper limit on the price of items on the market.  And that's why everything usually sells for much less than the equivalent in merit conversions and rarely, if ever, more.  It's also why the Panacea, Shield Wall, and Gladiator's Armor procs sell for 4 -5 million and not the 2 billion + price they had on live.

4) ???

5) Profit!

 

Your other suggestion to have an average price per day/week/month/whatever would be nice.  But my understanding is that the market is an especially fragile piece of spaghetti code.

Edited May 31, 2023 by Bionic_Flea

[FupDup]

I think a big part of the issue is the fact that the player market is the only practical way to acquire most items. Either you're entirely at the mercy of RNG for drops, or you have to deal with the wildly overpriced merit vendors. The market isn't an optional side method, it's the de-facto primary way to get nearly everything. 

 

IMO merit vendor prices for most enhancements, recipes, salvage rolls (still RNG but at least not a total rip-off), etc. should probably be lowered to put them somewhere near the median price of what those items sell for on the market right now and be locked in at that price. The special "salvage" like converters and boosters would be unchanged. And I also think we should be able to directly buy completed enhancements, not just recipes (recipes should of course be a bit cheaper than the finished product). That would set an effective upper limit on the market price because if somebody tried to charge more than the merit vendor then people would just take their business to the merit vendor. 

 

Ultimately, the important thing to remember is that this is all about getting items into players' hands since this thing is basically standing in as the game's unofficial item shop. I don't worship at the altar of muh freeeee market. I want a consistent amount of playtime/effort to translate to a consistent amount of rewards (not just the xp/inf but also enhancements and stuff). 

Edited May 31, 2023 by FupDup

[lemming]

My market experience seems to be different, I've thought the average price has been dropping.  Not a lot, just a bit.  Maybe that's just the popular enhancements.

I also tend to dump all my excess salvage onto the market and this would suck with that proposed limit of items.

 

It would have also really hurt my character when they were building common IOs for the other chars since they kept a near full inventory of salvage in the AH

[Yomo Kimyata]

23 hours ago, crimson72 said:

Here's how this could be addressed.  At any given time you can only have 10 items posted for sale, and additionally be bidding on 10 items, and can only purchase 50 items per 24hr period, and separately sell 50 items per 24hr period.  This would bottleneck access to the market through limitations that wouldn't discourage a player like me, but it would discourage rampant price manipulation.  People likely wouldn't put up low value items like white and yellow salvage, but others have already stated that the system gets involved in some cases to sell these.  Anyone trying to repost an item that's wildly above the market average for that item should either be denied, or have to pay a really high % posting fee, around 50%+.  It won't look like such a good idea if you're trying to sell an item for 5x more than the average while getting footed for a 50% tax on something that's going to sit for a long time and take up limited posting space.  Anyone caught using multi-boxing or multiple separate accounts to grossly circumvent the limitations should have all their accounts banned.  

 

Could you give me some examples of how markets are being manipulated right now?

[Rigged]

16 hours ago, crimson72 said:

How about ignore some of the other stuff I suggested, and let's focus on higher % taxes for erroneously priced items? 

 

I'll use an example.  A luck of the gambler defense/recharge 7.5% typically goes for around 6m, no?  Let's just say that's the average price for that item.  Now, someone shows up and posts a 12m tag on it, they have to put up 50% instead of 10%, or 6 million just to post it.  Meaning nobody would realistically ever put up an item for double the going market rate.  And people attempting to do this could be given some sort of notification.  

 

Also, I think information about the average price paid for a given item over a longer period than the last 5 sales of the item should be given to the player.  It's a better context as to what the true average price might be.  For all I know the last 5 items sold are lowball, or extraordinarily high, and I've got no info to help me know the difference.  

18 hours ago, crimson72 said:

I've had bids up for 5+ days on some items at what I assumed were reasonable prices that others paid according to the log.  If there's a way to pull up a longer term log, like average price paid for a given item over the period of a year for example, I haven't figured out how to access that.  I would gladly pay the yearly median price for any given item without any complaints.  

 

You are critically misunderstanding the mechanics of the market. You are not going to win ANYTHING offering an "average price". Get that out of your head right now. The market is an auction. The winner of the auction is not the guy who bids the average. The winner is the guy who bids then HIGHEST. You must WIN the bids, and WIN them by offering the HIGHEST price, not the AVERAGE.

 

Yearly median price is useless. If you want to pay the yearly median price, expect to wait for months. The last few bids - granted, having more than 5 would help - are what you need to know if you want to buy in FIVE DAYS. You need to offer at least as much as the last bid, and more if you think someone else offered more than that.

 

There is no way at all to corner a market on anything that you can use a enhancement converter to convert to. Learn how to use an enhancement converter and you will understand how stupid the concept of market manipulation is for yourself. If indeed someone is buying up all the enhancements to sell at stupid high prices, then all you have to do is use converters to make those enhancements and undercut them to make a killing. Learn how the market works and you will similarly learn how Sisyphean the task of manipulating it is - a process bound to fail unless the pool of marketers shrinks even further. Yes that is right, if you reduce the number of marketers, manipulating the market becomes even easier. 

 

You want to punish marketers, but you fail to realize that in this game, the marketers are the ones creating the supply. The converter is the tool they use for this. No, it is not farmers, it is not regular players like you, it is marketers who create the goods. Do you really think players farm enough LOTGs to sell at 6m each when just about everyone buys five? Have you any idea how much they cost on Live back when converters were highly limited? If things are too expensive for you, it is not because someone is manipulating the market, it is because lots of people want to buy the item for the exact same reason you do, and there are not enough marketers to fill that demand. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

13 hours ago, Rigged said:

You want to punish marketers, but you fail to realize that in this game, the marketers are the ones creating the supply. The converter is the tool they use for this. No, it is not farmers, it is not regular players like you, it is marketers who create the goods.

 

This whole post is good, but I highlight this for emphasis.  Anything not sold at a fixed price by a vendor was posted by a fellow player.  The bottleneck for many of the items you are looking for is supply.  I've watched over the years as many marketers, myself included, dropped out of the supply game for various reasons.  The bid-offer gap is huge and unless people want to provide supply either for profit or for some personal goal of doing good things for the market (whoever has been providing Perf Shifter procs for the past few years at essentially break even levels, I tip my hat to you), this is only going to get worse and worse until one day people just stop using the /AH entirely.  Death by ice.

 

[nihilii]

The suggestion in OP would create a massive liquidity crisis, give rise to a black market and even higher prices. You can't hire enough commissars to execute all the traitor capitalist rats and their multi-accounts, it's not a solution that scales for a free fanmade video game.

 

Let's give credit to the devs here, they have put in motion better parts of similar ideologies: effective price caps through the merit system and seeded Super Packs, complete with a true means of production approach to rewards where you can go anywhere to earn anything. Now this kind of systemic design works. It scales infinitely. You will never pay more than 20M for a purple IO unless you're determined to do so, because supply is ondemand.

[UltraAlt]

19 hours ago, nihilii said:

You can't hire enough commissars to execute all the traitor capitalist rats and their multi-accounts

 

who needs multiple accounts?

 

 

And what is the harm in little profit for bringing the goods to the people?

 

 

[SwitchFade]

On 5/31/2023 at 3:12 PM, FupDup said:

I think a big part of the issue is the fact that the player market is the only practical way to acquire most items. Either you're entirely at the mercy of RNG for drops, or you have to deal with the wildly overpriced merit vendors. The market isn't an optional side method, it's the de-facto primary way to get nearly everything. 

 

IMO merit vendor prices for most enhancements, recipes, salvage rolls (still RNG but at least not a total rip-off), etc. should probably be lowered to put them somewhere near the median price of what those items sell for on the market right now and be locked in at that price. The special "salvage" like converters and boosters would be unchanged. And I also think we should be able to directly buy completed enhancements, not just recipes (recipes should of course be a bit cheaper than the finished product). That would set an effective upper limit on the market price because if somebody tried to charge more than the merit vendor then people would just take their business to the merit vendor. 

 

Ultimately, the important thing to remember is that this is all about getting items into players' hands since this thing is basically standing in as the game's unofficial item shop. I don't worship at the altar of muh freeeee market. I want a consistent amount of playtime/effort to translate to a consistent amount of rewards (not just the xp/inf but also enhancements and stuff). 

I'm sorry, that's not how economics works.

 

Economics is not a thing like "muh free market," it is just a description of human behavior where wants/needs coexist with scarcity and humans make decisions on the margin.

 

Your suggestions would, In effect, end the auction house.

 

By placing a price cap where you suggest in merits, that would then render inf nearly pointless, cause merits to become the prime currency, cause the AH to be unused, distort gameplay accordingly and in some cases, raise prices.

 

Price ceilings only work where they are observant of marginal cost. The moment that cap is lower than the activity of creating and listing that good, all such good creation ceases and everyone moves to the lowest cost alternative, in this case the ceiling at the vendor.

 

You state that vendor prices are wildly overpriced...

 

100 merits = 300 converters or a recipe.

 

300 converters * 50-70k ea. = 18mill avg.

 

18 mill avg inf is the cap for a 100 merit recipe. You propose a recipe that sells on average for 5-7 million should then have it's merit vendor price set to that equivalent... That's 32ish merits.

 

You feel that the cap on the highest price enhances should be 18mill or 100 merits, based on your suggestion.

 

Scale that down to a recipe that is 50 or 25 merits...

 

AH would be empty, because the merit vendor would be the best option in 90% of cases.

Edited June 4, 2023 by SwitchFade

[SwitchFade]

On 6/1/2023 at 9:05 AM, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

This whole post is good, but I highlight this for emphasis.  Anything not sold at a fixed price by a vendor was posted by a fellow player.  The bottleneck for many of the items you are looking for is supply.  I've watched over the years as many marketers, myself included, dropped out of the supply game for various reasons.  The bid-offer gap is huge and unless people want to provide supply either for profit or for some personal goal of doing good things for the market (whoever has been providing Perf Shifter procs for the past few years at essentially break even levels, I tip my hat to you), this is only going to get worse and worse until one day people just stop using the /AH entirely.  Death by ice.

 

This highlights the fact a market is a human driven set of interactive behaviors...

 

If the market reached a point where lack of participation by players occured, in a market where all goods are normal and substitutable, there is no fix because the market is essentially NOT a market, because nothing is being purchased.

 

If we reach this point, the npc vendor is then the only option.

 

The struggle is real.

[SwitchFade]

For perspective...

 

Let's say I am marketer that is average efficiency. I buy a recipe, craft and roll it up to a worthwhile IO, like a defense or proc...

 

Craft cost + recipe + salvage + 15-20 converters = 1.5 to 2mill cost

 

I must always sell at 2.5mill or higher or the activity is pointless. Most mid teir iOS go for 2-4 mill.

 

Even LoTG procs sell for 4-6 mill on average.

 

Lowering the price ceiling to those respective price equivalent points in merits? I would never craft again, I would vendor it, because the cost of a good at a vendor is now so low that my time spent using the AH is less rewarding (and in some cases more expensive) than playing a taskforce for merits. Now most people play primarily TFs because this is the de facto way to get beat rewards, as inf is now devalued. And story content is mainly solo, no one joins you.

 

Food for thought.

[Outrider_01]

On 5/30/2023 at 7:32 PM, crimson72 said:

This would bottleneck access to the market through limitations that wouldn't discourage a player like me, but it would discourage rampant price manipulation. 

You don't seem to understand economics and its simple stuff you learned in highschool, but I will give a vey complex
 

Spoiler

	Supply	Demand	Price
✅	⬆️	⬇️	⬇️
❌	⬇️	⬆️	⬆️

 

You want the first option. 

 

By flooding the supply, demand is kept down which influences prices to keep it down.  Then the demand is everyone just buying as needed, but the price is high because of instant gratification and a large supply of influence.

 

By controlling and bottlenecking the supply so low as you suggest, the price will skyrocket.   The demand is controlled, therefore only a few will be able to afford it and you can sell it at any price you want exploiting just because they have the influence and a small supply of it, putting prices out of the hands of Super Joe Average. Like half a billion luxury yachts custom made to order in real life.

[Bionic_Flea]

16 hours ago, Outrider_01 said:

god damn repost

Top right . . . three little dots like these ... click on that and then "hide".  POOF!  Problem solved.

[Clave Dark 5]

On 5/31/2023 at 1:56 AM, crimson72 said:

^{It's NOT stable.  If so, then explain to me why builds that cost 20m a couple years ago are now in excess of 100m to build?}

Not to gang up on you at here, just something to consider: You can easily play on SOs, you know.  I never slot purples, only sometimes ATOs, and I play just fine.  Plus I often go ahead and pay the "I need it NAOW" prices.  Cash is easy, and I don't even play the marketing game. 

 

Just go pewpewpew, slot what you can when you can, and things will be just fine.  Promise!  Don't let your imagined perfect be the enemy of your face smashing pewpewpew good.

[TheZag]

On 5/31/2023 at 2:56 AM, crimson72 said:

People fixing the market/prices is the most logical explanation. 

 

 

Someone could manipulate a low demand item for a short time and make almost no profit because the item was low demand to begin with.  Attempting to manipulate a high demand item takes hours of work every single day.  You have to login when you first wake up and buy all the new stock that the marketeers put up at fair prices then collect all of those from the AH and re-list them.  Then you have to repeat the process every 1-2 hours to ensure no product is listed under your price for very long.  And you have to hope nobody notices that you are trying to manipulate an item or they will keep converting to that enhancement to sell to you at your inflated price.  The end result is you end up with dozens of enhancements that you paid 6 million for and were attempting to sell for 8 million when nobody will pay more than 3 million.  You end up having to sell for 2 million just to offload 50 or more enhancements and take a loss of 4 million on each.  Trying to manipulate the market is a cool way to lose a lot of money quick.  And all of this is just for a single item.  Ramp that up to every enhancement in the game and you need a group of people with so much money that they dont mind losing billions of inf every day to cover the losses of their attempted market manipulation.

 

The amount of people that would have to be involved in a price manipulation conspiracy and nobody let the secret out would be insane.  So price manipulation becomes illogical and the logical explanation becomes devaluation of the currency through rampant printing of money (influence generation through regular gameplay and farming).  4 years ago when there was only a trillion inf in the economy,  all those enhancements for a build only cost 20 million.  Now,  when there is 300 quadrillion inf in the economy,  people are willing to spend more to 'get it now' and that same build costs 100 million.  This is still due to the players who are buying enhancements and not from the players who are placing enhancements for sale.

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

22 hours ago, TheZag said:

 

 

Someone could manipulate a low demand item for a short time and make almost no profit because the item was low demand to begin with.  Attempting to manipulate a high demand item takes hours of work every single day.  You have to login when you first wake up and buy all the new stock that the marketeers put up at fair prices then collect all of those from the AH and re-list them.  Then you have to repeat the process every 1-2 hours to ensure no product is listed under your price for very long.  And you have to hope nobody notices that you are trying to manipulate an item or they will keep converting to that enhancement to sell to you at your inflated price.  The end result is you end up with dozens of enhancements that you paid 6 million for and were attempting to sell for 8 million when nobody will pay more than 3 million.  You end up having to sell for 2 million just to offload 50 or more enhancements and take a loss of 4 million on each.  Trying to manipulate the market is a cool way to lose a lot of money quick.  And all of this is just for a single item.  Ramp that up to every enhancement in the game and you need a group of people with so much money that they dont mind losing billions of inf every day to cover the losses of their attempted market manipulation.

 

The amount of people that would have to be involved in a price manipulation conspiracy and nobody let the secret out would be insane.  So price manipulation becomes illogical and the logical explanation becomes devaluation of the currency through rampant printing of money (influence generation through regular gameplay and farming).  4 years ago when there was only a trillion inf in the economy,  all those enhancements for a build only cost 20 million.  Now,  when there is 300 quadrillion inf in the economy,  people are willing to spend more to 'get it now' and that same build costs 100 million.  This is still due to the players who are buying enhancements and not from the players who are placing enhancements for sale.

 

 

This is all true, but also keep in mind that "logical" does not necessarily mean "profit maximizing" or even "profitable".

 

 

[Gerswin]

If you could buy/sell converters in stacks of 1000 instead of 10 prices would go down across the board. The biggest bottleneck in the market is how tedious it is to craft and convert and how few people want to spend their evenings clicking and dragging.

[honoroit]

its likely only means to make munee on packs.  conversion is labor intensive.

 

once youve a pad, you sweep on alts for things like 'stupid honoroit is selling a set of atos at 4.5m ask, bc he NEEDS 100x prisms to be able to create a new character)... so but at 5 repost at 7,777,778 and get it bought at the weekend or whenever the HC ah scoop/normalizer algoritm comes around (im convinced theres phantom sink buys, it keeps stuff moving and encourages us to hunt for gil/inf bia ah interactions, kupo)

 

then packs, and flips on purps, winters, and pvps (less good now rheyve dropped hard, specially melee)