Is Market Inefficiency Causing Salvage Price Spiral?

[Herotu]

For the avoidance of doubt, "Market Inefficiency", in this instance, means the inefficiency of the Market code in processing orders.

 

Does the slow processing of players' orders cause prices to spiral? I think so. Oftentimes I see prices rise and rise as impatient people outbid one another because the processing is slow.

 

What on earth is going on? The market code seems... considerably sub-optimal. Why do we see weird shifts where suddenly the price of yellow salvage goes to relatively high levels of influence each for weeks on end.

 

I believe there should be an OPTION, when setting price, to have the asking price decrease over time. This would allow old orders to eventually fill. It's an alternative to having the offer expire after a time period. Look at how much Yellow salvage exists on the AH. At the time of writing 10,021,032 for sale. And yet the price is quite high. It's a failure.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Herotu

[Snarky]

as i understand it (and this is all rumor and guesswork) when they merged categories of items (all common salvage, all enhancer ABC attuned or not, etc) they made basically a giant spreadsheet warehouse.  New stuff went in, and searches of prices or buys would have to take this extra step.  To ensure things went according to plan there is a "manager" a hyper efficient little hamster named Godor.  Unfortunately, Godor suffers from depression, drinks a lot, and is honestly just horrid at his job.  But bless our Devs, they do not want to throw Godor out into the cold.  

 

So... that is how we ended up with the current market state.

[MoonSheep]

what price are we defining as “high”?

 

for yellow salvage i’ll generally just mash in 55,555 for anything and for commons it’s 11,111, no idea what the price is meant to be

[Etched]

Y'all need nicer SG leaders. I refill the lockers every two weeks and I rarely buy any salvage from the AH. I just play and I get tons of common, uncommon, and rare salvage to keep them filled. The rest I vender. 

 

Amount of Inf spent on salvage = 0 and I still make good Inf from venderin the common and uncommon to keep my low lvl toons fightin the good fight.

 

@Etched

[Without_Pause]

25 minutes ago, MoonSheep said:

what price are we defining as “high”?

 

for yellow salvage i’ll generally just mash in 55,555 for anything and for commons it’s 11,111, no idea what the price is meant to be

I'm hellbent at buying commons at most for 100 and uncommons at 1k. Around 3 weeks ago uncommons skipped to where even buying them at 1.5k is an absolute crap shoot. At one point I saw I was able to take stacks of uncommons and sell them for 500k to 1 mill per stack. Sure, currency is easy to get, but new players don't know that and them walking into uncommon salvage being sold for 100k isn't helpful. I have enough high level characters I just run them and get the salvage I need. Even better is when I dual box a couple level 50s who are working on their Incarnates. I run arcs at +3/x8 and rotate who does the mission. 

Edited August 23, 2023 by Without_Pause

[Bionic_Flea]

1 hour ago, Herotu said:

 Look at how much Yellow salvage exists on the AH. At the time of writing 10,021,032 for sale. And yet the price is quite high. It's a failure.

 

10 million or so of that 10,021,032 is the original amount the devs seeded the market with at a price of 100,000.  That means the 21,032 is player supplied.  The closer that gets to 0, the higher the price tends to go until it will cap at 100,000.  If more people sold yellow salvage on the market, the price wouldn't fluctuate so much.

 

All that said, I do think that slow market response can lead to higher prices.  I am certainly guilty of quickly raising my bid by a factor of 10 until I get my precious.

[UltraAlt]

1 hour ago, Herotu said:

the price of yellow salvage goes to relatively high levels of influence each for weeks on end.

 

1 hour ago, Herotu said:

Look at how much Yellow salvage exists on the AH. At the time of writing 10,021,032 for sale. And yet the price is quite high. It's a failure.

 

What are you considering to be "relatively high" or  "quite high"?

 

Also, I have never seen any drastic increase of yellows for weeks on end.

 

I have seen the price of yellows go above 50k for short periods of time twice since I've been buying large numbers of them on Homecoming.

I even had some characters put some on the market for 50k so that they could make a profit when that happened. I didn't do it with a ton of yellows, but probably a couple of hundred which is minor compared to the amount that is supposed to be on hand. 

 

1 hour ago, Herotu said:

Does the slow processing of players' orders cause prices to spiral? I think so. Oftentimes I see prices rise and rise as impatient people outbid one another because the processing is slow.

 

Yes. Impatient people can end up paying far more for something than patient people. That's the increased cost for expedited delivery.

[Without_Pause]

Also factored into things, if the player base gets smaller, there is less stock. If less people are farming, that means there's going to be less stock. Considering what I can dual box on a number of characters through regular missions, I have no real desire to farm, or certainly do it regularly. Why farm for lesser rewards when Unai Kemen exists? I don't even need a 'farming build' for that.

[High_Beam]

I am not a marketeer (lack of patience, skill or desire to improve either), yellows are the ones I actually sell the most.  Most of my recipe crafting demands white and orange so that's what is in the lockers less 5 of each yellow type.  All of my alts restock the bins as they get and sell what remains.  Yes the slowness and impatience does occur with me, becuase when I am on my crafter, I dont want to wait very long to complete my crafting so I will put a higher bid in at times.  But its not that slow so its rarely an issue.

[Herotu]

54 minutes ago, Snarky said:

To ensure things went according to plan there is a "manager" a hyper efficient little hamster named Godor. 

Ah, that's who it is, then. Didi and Gogo await!

[Andreah]

I don't get an impression the market code is inefficient. 

 

I think it's much more likely that prices rise up rapidly due to the "bursty" nature of how the major crafters purchase salvage, especially the common and uncommons.  For example when a crafter character logs in, the player/farmer may intend to craft dozens of recipes in a quick session. If they need salvage, they're not going to nickle and dime bidding on low-end salvage to get the best price. They'll quickly raise their bids until they get what they need. Commons and uncommons are so cheap the expense is a trivial round-off error compared to the revenue they intend to get, and their time is more valuable than that. Even rares get this, which is why you'll see the price hover in the low 400's often, but quickly spike up over 500K for short periods. You can get rare salvage slowly over time in the lower part of the range, but if you need a lot right away, you need to, and will, pay for it - it's not going to cut profits much to pay 500K vs 400K.  The same things happen for commons and uncommons, only more so.

 

Also, the supply of salvage is inelastic with respect to price. You can pay more, but the supply on the market won't increase; players won't play more or farm harder because uncommons are suddenly going for 25K instead of 2.5K. We're all bidding for the same, more or less fixed, supply of materials.

 

Aggressive flipping could help stabilize the prices of the market, but that is hugely time-inefficient market work for commons or uncommons. There are probably flippers working the rares market, but even that sounds on the tedious, low profit side to me.

[kelika2]

15 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

I'm hellbent at buying commons at most for 100 and uncommons at 1k.

with the market cuts the seller is selling at a loss to vendor price

and if the jojo moment where you are about to change your ways and factor in the market cut to the seller will break even... why not just vendor?  less clicking, less clicking and dragging and less time spent on checking each price of each thing.

 

and with people mass vendoring and the well of uncommon salvage is drying up AND sellers are making a decent enough profit selling for 2-3k even 5k why go back?

[Herotu]

4 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

Also factored into things, if the player base gets smaller, there is less stock. If less people are farming, that means there's going to be less stock. 

Fewer players also means less demand. Can we conclude that there's been a change in the type of player?

[Andreah]

14 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

10 million or so of that 10,021,032 is the original amount the devs seeded the market with at a price of 100,000.  That means the 21,032 is player supplied.  The closer that gets to 0, the higher the price tends to go until it will cap at 100,000.  If more people sold yellow salvage on the market, the price wouldn't fluctuate so much.

I'd wager a lot of that 21,032 are old postings that people put in at silly high prices, too. 

 

I'd tempted to just buy and delete it all, and see how high those posts really were. It would only cost ~2 billion at max (21032 x 99999) to buy out everything that wasn't seeded, and take eleven alts with 200 market slots each to do the bids. It would take maybe a couple hours to do, and best done when the servers were minimally busy.

[Andreah]

4 minutes ago, kelika2 said:

with the market cuts the seller is selling at a loss to vendor price

and if the jojo moment where you are about to change your ways and factor in the market cut to the seller will break even... why not just vendor?  less clicking, less clicking and dragging and less time spent on checking each price of each thing.

If I had been the one to originally code the market, I would have insisted in the market auto-buying (and deleting) anything posted for sale at or below the vendor price. If you posted something for 1, "my" Wentworth's would give you 1 for it on the spot. :D 

[MoonSheep]

25 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

I'm hellbent at buying commons at most for 100 and uncommons at 1k. Around 3 weeks ago uncommons skipped to where even buying them at 1.5k is an absolute crap shoot. At one point I saw I was able to take stacks of uncommons and sell them for 500k to 1 mill per stack. Sure, currency is easy to get, but new players don't know that and them walking into uncommon salvage being sold for 100k isn't helpful. I have enough high level characters I just run them and get the salvage I need. Even better is when I dual box a couple level 50s who are working on their Incarnates. I run arcs at +3/x8 and rotate who does the mission. 

 

that makes me think of the days on live where people would put a stranglehold on certain salvage and inflate the price - good ol marketeering 

[Herotu]

  

15 minutes ago, Andreah said:

I don't get an impression the market code is inefficient. 

 

I think it's much more likely that prices rise up rapidly due to the "bursty" nature of how the major crafters purchase salvage, especially the common and uncommons.  For example when a crafter character logs in, the player/farmer may intend to craft dozens of recipes in a quick session. If they need salvage, they're not going to nickle and dime bidding on low-end salvage to get the best price. They'll quickly raise their bids until they get what they need. Commons and uncommons are so cheap the expense is a trivial round-off error compared to the revenue they intend to get, and their time is more valuable than that.

But if the processing of the orders was quick, you would expect those prices to fall again quite rapidly. 

 

29 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

 

10 million or so of that 10,021,032 is the original amount the devs seeded the market with at a price of 100,000.

Good info. Now the market suddenly seems much smaller (and more open to manipulation).

 

I also agree with the assertions about supply being low. It seems that there are fewer farmers or the farmers that do exist have perhaps declined to sell yellows. As Andreah states, "their time is more valuable than that".

 

So the supply is probably the issue, not the processing, even though that does appear very slow sometimes.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Herotu

[Andreah]

16 minutes ago, Herotu said:

But if the processing of the orders was quick, you would expect those prices to fall again quite rapidly. 

 

Why? You won't see a price change until there's another posted for sale below the current highest unfulfilled bid to buy. Most people don't leave bids up to buy mats in advance, they buy them when they need them, and they want them right away.

 

Edit: I'll add that posting of salvage to the market is also "bursty" -- people will let their salvage get close to full and then go sell it all at once. Those are the infrequent times when the price gets driven down quickly. 

 

Also, human nature being what it is, many people just echo the last posted history sale price they see when they are buying.  And they are not wrong to do so for cheap salvage, the time spent canceling an order that doesn't fill to post a slightly higher one isn't worth the savings. A few thousand inf is not worth the clicking to them. Heck, people will commonly overbid by the millions for high end enhancements. They could bid-creep on those and they don't, why expect them to bid creep by the mere hundreds or thousands for junk?

 

The characteristic variability I see makes sense to me without casting my suspicion onto the code efficiency or mechanics of the market.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Andreah

[Andreah]

9 minutes ago, Herotu said:

Good info. Now the market suddenly seems much smaller (and more open to manipulation).

 

Join the dark side! :D 

[Uun]

Sorry, it's my fault 😉. I sell all my uncommon salvage on the AH for 999 inf, but I've been busy lately and haven't been in game for a few days. I've seen the uncommon salvage price spike occasionally, but I put in my bids at 2k or 3k and they're always filled within a few hours. If I need something sooner I might bid 5k. I've been bidding 500 inf for common salvage for years and I don't think I've ever had an order not filled immediately. 

[Andreah]

34 minutes ago, Uun said:

 I've seen the uncommon salvage price spike occasionally, but I put in my bids at 2k or 3k and they're always filled within a few hours. If I need something sooner I might bid 5k. I've been bidding 500 inf for common salvage for years and I don't think I've ever had an order not filled immediately. 

Patience and forethought have always paid big dividends at Wentworth's.

[Without_Pause]

1 hour ago, Herotu said:

Fewer players also means less demand. Can we conclude that there's been a change in the type of player?

Farmers made the case they actually helped keep prices low. Homecoming made farming less enticing as ever. It isn't that difficult to see why certain changes are leading to long term price increases. I'm just glad I'm far enough along to where the genuine need of currency is easy to deal with. 

[lemming]

51 minutes ago, Andreah said:

Edit: I'll add that posting of salvage to the market is also "bursty" -- people will let their salvage get close to full and then go sell it all at once. Those are the infrequent times when the price gets driven down quickly.

That's me!

 

I just went thru a bunch of dumping common & uncommon on the market for 11.   Common started sitting for a bit before selling.  Uncommon seemed to stick above 1k for the ones I sold.   I tend to run out the commons, and leave a couple on hand of each type of uncommon after restocking the base.

[Without_Pause]

1 hour ago, kelika2 said:

with the market cuts the seller is selling at a loss to vendor price

and if the jojo moment where you are about to change your ways and factor in the market cut to the seller will break even... why not just vendor?  less clicking, less clicking and dragging and less time spent on checking each price of each thing.

 

and with people mass vendoring and the well of uncommon salvage is drying up AND sellers are making a decent enough profit selling for 2-3k even 5k why go back?

People sell at a loss on the market all the time. See also common IO recipes. There's enough of a player base sitting on so much currency it isn't that terrible to sell things on the market for less at a vendor. Selling on the market is also quicker, so there is that. Honestly, any new character I make uses grabbing stuff off the market for less than vendor value until I get enough currency to start working enhancements convertors, and yes, I have billions. I kind of feel like it is just a way for the player base to give back to newer characters. 

[Bionic_Flea]

1 hour ago, Uun said:

Sorry, it's my fault

 

Dang it, Uun!