Is Market Inefficiency Causing Salvage Price Spiral?

[Intrinsic]

Just FYI, I think the last few posts were responding to a spambot.

 

At the moment I see about 240K bids for yellow salvage, versus about 18K bids for rare salvage and almost no open bids for common salvage.  That doesn't look like technical inefficiency; that looks like someone putting up a flood of bids to manipulate/troll the market.  Can't say with 100% certainty of course, since the bid details are hidden from us.  The market's financial inefficiency makes it difficult to determine whether there is technical inefficiency occurring as well.

Edited October 4 by Intrinsic

[Mr. Apocalypse]

The only salvage I sell on AH is orange, yellow and white are pointless, they get sold to NPC store.  I buy everything a for a few more inf than what the last one sold for. I dont have time to wait around for the market, so I bump until I win what I want.  It's not like it is real money and it is too easy to continually sit on billions of inf to worry about the market price swings. if something sell for 10M to day and the 20M tomorrow, I don't complain I just buy it for that price and move along to my next thing.

 

Even if someone is trying to corner the market, your low bid will still eventually net you a reward, you just might have to wait a bit longer. in my experience salvage usually always gets back to reasonable costs withing a day or two. sometimes within minutes of seeing crazy high prices across the board.  The AH code is also a hot mess and there are many reporting bugs when it comes to availability and price.

[brasilgringo]

Someone definitely has been trying to keep a price floor, bidding stacks of yellows at 10,666 or thereabouts.  This week, they've gone up to 11,666.  Just stacks being filled at that price.  I'm surprised the market is bearing it, who knows.  Unless something has really happened to slow the supply of yellows to the market, or to massively increase their demand (ToT?), kinda feels like manip but who knows?  Hurts my margins a bit for crafting when yellows are 5x+ more expensive than they were (or 10x).  But not the end of the world, just annoying.

[Hedgefund]

Instead of thinking of a single expense increasing 10x, think of actual margins decreasing less than 1% (assuming a prior profit of 1.3M* would now be 1.29M). 

 

*I made up 1.3M as some sort net profit after crafting and AH fees, if someone wants to tell me they get more per sale, I don't care.  If they want to tell me they get less, I don't care, it's just for an example.

[brasilgringo]

17 hours ago, Hedgefund said:

Instead of thinking of a single expense increasing 10x, think of actual margins decreasing less than 1% (assuming a prior profit of 1.3M* would now be 1.29M). 

 

*I made up 1.3M as some sort net profit after crafting and AH fees, if someone wants to tell me they get more per sale, I don't care.  If they want to tell me they get less, I don't care, it's just for an example.

True. At 10k-11k per yellow it's less about the absolute margin impact and more about the principle of the thing.  At 40k-50k it still doesn't really hurt that much, just stings from an annoyance perspective.  I guess props to whomever's behind this tho, they must be raking it in.

[Bionic_Flea]

I think that 10-11K has become the new equilibrium point and will remain until a LOT more people put there yellow salvage on the market.  While someone may be messing with it, I tend to think that it all of us, in aggregate, that are paying that price if we want to craft because lower bids are not getting filled and we need to craft NOW.

 

I mean how many uncommon salvage items would you have to sell to make it a worthwhile investment?  Even if you bought at 1,000 and sold at 10,000 for a 8,450 inf profit (after AE fees), you'd have to sell about 120 (12 stacks of 10) to make a million in profit.  Anyone should be able to make a million profit in one or two slots without even trying and can frequently make multiple millions in just one slot.  And I highly doubt that anyone, even a flipper, is buying them at 1,000 anymore.  So the profit margin is probably 10 times less.

[Andreah]

If someone's buying up huge amounts of Uncommon salvage, they're either crafting a huge number of recipes or are flipping them. If the latter, I don't see how that would make enough inf to be worth the trouble, unless they were using CoC-violating macros or full-on botting.

 

There's an old saying that you will make more money trading wheat than diamonds. But that's only true if you can efficiently manage large scale trades. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

2 hours ago, Andreah said:

There's an old saying that you will make more money trading wheat than diamonds. But that's only true if you can efficiently manage large scale trades. 

There’s another old saying I’ve used more than I care to admit:  “We’re losing money on every trade, but we’re making it up in volume!”

[Andreah]

19 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

There’s another old saying I’ve used more than I care to admit:  “We’re losing money on every trade, but we’re making it up in volume!”

 

 

Edited October 18 by Andreah

[Without_Pause]

I don't generate enough yellows to really try to bring it down. Whoever is doing it at the level is simply well beyond what I can go, and if I'm grabbing yellows off the market, I'm generating far more from it to really care what the price is. I honestly haven't hammered the Level 41 Def recipe market in sometime. I'm mostly crafting with a possible conversation, and selling it on the market. I had a character doing this in the 30s, and they have been fine since. I see no reason for them to not do it from here on out, and it might be my staple going forward at least in terms of once a character can gain level 30 recipes. Slot whatever until 27, pop a respec, fund as needed, and then they are good to go.

[lemming]

Yea, I play more than craft so I keep tossing yellows onto the AH, but haven't been able to get the price to start lowering.  I did a sweep of characters recently and dropped probably a few thousand yellows.  Drop in the bucket either way

[nihilii]

At 10k, I'm not sure there's any sort of manipulation going on. For years, I've been straight up deleting my uncommon salvage from my inventory. At 10k per pop, I'm now motivated to list it for 1 on the AH instead (even though it's *probably* still not worth my time on the grand scheme of things). It may just be that an overall maturing playerbase, in average character level played and personal wealth, has pushed more and more people to this behavior, to the point too many of us are deleting salvage instead of selling it. Suppliers need to be motivated. 10k seems like as rational a price point as any.

[golstat2003]

On 10/18/2023 at 12:46 PM, Andreah said:

If someone's buying up huge amounts of Uncommon salvage, they're either crafting a huge number of recipes or are flipping them. If the latter, I don't see how that would make enough inf to be worth the trouble, unless they were using CoC-violating macros or full-on botting.

 

There's an old saying that you will make more money trading wheat than diamonds. But that's only true if you can efficiently manage large scale trades. 

 

Keep in mind the person could be CRAFTING them, and THEN CONVERTING them into the more expensive IOs like LOTG 7.5 Rech, Numina's Rec/Reg, Miracle +Recovery, the Panacea Proc, etc etc etc.

Edited October 25 by golstat2003

[golstat2003]

On 10/21/2023 at 9:38 AM, nihilii said:

At 10k, I'm not sure there's any sort of manipulation going on. For years, I've been straight up deleting my uncommon salvage from my inventory. At 10k per pop, I'm now motivated to list it for 1 on the AH instead (even though it's *probably* still not worth my time on the grand scheme of things). It may just be that an overall maturing playerbase, in average character level played and personal wealth, has pushed more and more people to this behavior, to the point too many of us are deleting salvage instead of selling it. Suppliers need to be motivated. 10k seems like as rational a price point as any.

 

Also pretty much this. Having to constantly open the AH to drop in 2-5 yellow salvage gets . . . tedious.

 

Personally, I'd need a lot more than 10K to do that. Catalysts or Boosters sure. Those are guaranteed 80K at least.

 

Yellow salvage . . . nah.

[Andreah]

35 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

Keep in mind the person could be CRAFTING them, and THEN CONVERTING them into the more expensive IOs like LOTG 7.5 Rech, Numina's Rec/Reg, Miracle +Recovery, the Panacea Proc, etc etc etc.

I should have been more clear.

 

I outlined two alternatives, the first of which is crafting a great many recipes. Almost certainly this is to convert and resell as more valuable ones, and of course this makes good inf per unit. It's also a lot more work per unit. I could see someone doing this for up to a few hundred recipes per day, but not the thousands needed to become the dominant buyer of yellow salvage. It's possible there are dozens of new players in the craft-to-convert game, and that would make it possible, but I don't see the downstream effects of that (a more general softening in the prices of the better IO's that would result from greatly increased supply of them)

 

The second alternative (the latter one) would be to flip the salvage itself for a profit; e.g., to buy yellow salvage up at 15K and relist it at, say, 20k to make a 3K profit per unit. This is the point to which "I don't see how that would make enough inf to be worth the trouble" because it's hard to do on a large scale without macros or botting.  Whoever tries this is going to end up with a lot of unsold salvage jamming up every nook and cranny they could possibly store it in.

[golstat2003]

15 minutes ago, Andreah said:

I should have been more clear.

 

I outlined two alternatives, the first of which is crafting a great many recipes. Almost certainly this is to convert and resell as more valuable ones, and of course this makes good inf per unit. It's also a lot more work per unit. I could see someone doing this for up to a few hundred recipes per day, but not the thousands needed to become the dominant buyer of yellow salvage. It's possible there are dozens of new players in the craft-to-convert game, and that would make it possible, but I don't see the downstream effects of that (a more general softening in the prices of the better IO's that would result from greatly increased supply of them)

 

The second alternative (the latter one) would be to flip the salvage itself for a profit; e.g., to buy yellow salvage up at 15K and relist it at, say, 20k to make a 3K profit per unit. This is the point to which "I don't see how that would make enough inf to be worth the trouble" because it's hard to do on a large scale without macros or botting.  Whoever tries this is going to end up with a lot of unsold salvage jamming up every nook and cranny they could possibly store it in.

 

Makes more sense. I actually think it's the first one, with them doing in with multiple toons dedicated to crafting COMBINED, with everyone else now paying the new "buy it now price". For me, I refuse to bid creep or wait on something as inconsequential and silly as Yellow salvage when I'm crafting stuff to convert. Even 50K for yellow salvage during that time of crafting to convert is irrelevant to me, when I craft something and can just convert it to something that makes back all that cost and more easily. I'm guessing for others who make inf this way on the market also.

Edited October 25 by golstat2003

[Perfidy]

At the risk...well, no risk, I'll just accept I'm being nitpicky about the terms being used. It's not market inefficiency. It's server speed inefficiency, or whatever the IT folks call it when the orders placed by players take more time than it should to be processed by the servers. 

And yes, it definitely causes a slight push upwards on the price of all items on the market. You want a pvp IO, so you place a low ball bid of 5M for that Shield Wall 5% Def(all) piece. Nothing happens. You figure another 500K won't break your bank and increase it again. Your impatience gets the best of you, and suddenly you're at 6M, then 6.5M, and suddenly it goe through. You don't know this, of course, but there's a chance it might have actually gone through at 6M, but the server was too slow to process the order, and you were too impatient. Or both. 

Ever place a bid on 10 items for 9000 inf? 
If the server that handles the AH is dragging behind, it will show something that the server is not busy enough for me to snip and sketch at the moment, but it will show a bid for 10 items at 0 inf, with (in my example here of 9k inf) 90,000 total. 

Sometimes, it takes several seconds for the hamsters to spin the wheel fast enough for the server to actually finish placing the bid of 9000 inf for each of the 10 I want. I've never noticed this when just bidding on one item. 

So, yes, no doubt in my mind the player's impatience and the server's inability to process the 1000's of orders being placed at any one moment in time (remember, the AH is across ALL the servers) is going to be a factor in final accepted bid price. 

[Without_Pause]

I don't think I have ever pulled a bid without waiting for the server to process the request. I intentionally bid low for the vast majority of the time, and I'm willing to wait to check back later that day if not the next day or so.

 

Lets run with the server idea anyway. Uncommon salvage has spiked in the past 3-4 months. Has the player base increased so much during that time in order to put that much of a strain on the servers? Considering the Scrapper forum at one point was one of the busiest forums on the site and now can go a week without a post, I don't think we are seeking a genuine enough spike in those playing to really be able to say that the servers are causing the spike in pricing. Based on peak numbers for players, CPU usage would be around 14%.

[Herotu]

On 9/28/2023 at 12:13 PM, Saiyajinzoningen said:

the real treasure are the friends you make along the way.

Yes yes, Confucius say all your base are belong to us.