Never admit to being a Marketeer in game...

[The Trouble]

I discovered Homecoming in 2023.  So unlike the early adopters, I didn't have coffers overflowing with money.  The anticipation of having a "perfect" build became too much, and because I play mostly solo, I realized that in order to have the influence to fund my "perfect build" quickly was through Wentworth's.  I did some reading.  Long story short: I had my enhancements already in my inventory as the slots became available.  It was amazing.

 

Anyhow, I was teamed on a farm to get some quick early levels on one of my Tankers.  The lead was generously giving me advice on my powerset because their main shared the same primary.  Then they casually complained how hard it was to keep funding their growing stable of alts.  They said that farming got them about 20m per hour. So I shared some marketing wisdom... sort of a "thank you" for their build advice.  I let them know they could get about ten times what they were making in the same amount of time.

 

Their response was filled with the most profanity filters I've seen in the two-ish years I've been back in Paragon City!  "Greedy" this, "price-gouging", that, "manipulation" this, "leeching" that...  The entire mood soured instantly.  I had no idea of the stigma until I opened my mouth, and it honestly shocked me.

 

Has anyone else made the mistake of admitting they're an evil Wentworth's leech in-game?

[lemming]

7 minutes ago, The Trouble said:

Has anyone else made the mistake of admitting they're an evil Wentworth's leech in-game?

Huh.   I hadn't run into that personally, but do hear it occasionally, but you do see all sorts of stuff that is similar.

 

Pretty much anyone that does anything will be painted badly by some people who don't do that.   And it's usually a loud minority.  I'd ignore them and maybe put a note on their global not to discuss market.   Any of the techniques used requires a bit of upfront work and there are a few.  

 

I used to have a problem outfitting my chars, but once you get to a point, it gets way easier.   I don't even do much marketing or farming, just enough to generate some drops and sell off excess, purchase some missing bits.    I also limit my number of alts to a manageable level, though in my case it's making sure I don't go all CDO on getting certain timed events done on ALL my characters.    This had the side effect of making outfitting everyone much easier, though I need to go thru on another pass. (Spending way too much time on going thru the new badges)

 

I made an ALT the other day and in the outfitting of, I did wind up buying a bunch of non-PVP, VR sets.  Noted, the cost of this char didn't have much of an effect on the rise of the inf collection.   They still need some VR sets since I tend to just use the ones I get as drops and I finally used up my reserve of those, but they drop fast enough.  I might go ahead and buy some when I get to the last six or so.

[Andreah]

marketeering doesn't cause inflation. not even "flipping". Inflation is caused by there being too much Inf in circulation relative to supply of goods.

 

And we don't even have inflation. We have very slow, long term, deflation.

[Troo]

Many don't like know-it-all folks. Many don't appreciate unsolicited advice. Why it's a thing, I dunno.

Sometimes providing a link to a third party is the way to go. Even if we would have provided the same information.

 

<- Is this true?

 

fyi - The Council of Ebil meets on the fifth Thursday of the month to update the bestest method of infamy acquisition.

 

still a favorite Yomo moment, just burning cash at the council of ebil..

 

 

Edited February 12 by Troo

[UltraAlt]

5 hours ago, The Trouble said:

Has anyone else made the mistake of admitting they're an evil Wentworth's leech in-game?

 

The correct - I believe - is Ebil Marketer.

 

"Always keep your mask on"

 

5 hours ago, The Trouble said:

Their response was filled with the most profanity filters I've seen in the two-ish years I've been back in Paragon City!  "Greedy" this, "price-gouging", that, "manipulation" this, "leeching" that...  The entire mood soured instantly.  I had no idea of the stigma until I opened my mouth, and it honestly shocked me.

 

It almost like some Farmers don't realize that they are the outcast as far as some of the City dwellers are concerned.

I have had some choice words about Farming over the years, but I don't think I ever cursed about it.

 

But, farm on, farmers, and dis on marketing! I'll take your influence from you.

Power-level all the alts you want and enhance them out. I'll take your influence for that as well.

 

The Market is the most balanced PvP in the City.

[The Trouble]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

Many don't like know-it-all folks. Many don't appreciate unsolicited advice. Why it's a thing, I dunno.

The greatest irony is that I didn't ask for the build advice they gave, and I thought I was returning a favor.  Although, they did say that Dark Armor would have Endurance issues that couldn't be solved until Incarnates, and that hasn't been my experience at all.

 

Maybe that's due to being an Ebil Marketeer (thanks @UltraAlt), and being able to afford all those End Discount bonuses. 🤷‍♂️

[Ironblade]

10 hours ago, The Trouble said:

Has anyone else made the mistake of admitting they're an evil Wentworth's leech in-game?

 

Sure, but I don't regard it as a mistake.  I've never seen the reaction you described.  If I did, I would regard it as a jackass revealing their true nature and inviting themself to my ignore list.  🙂

[lemming]

7 hours ago, Troo said:

Is this true?

I'm very upset about this.

[Troo]

2 hours ago, lemming said:

I'm very upset about this.

 

I will trooly endeavor to do better.

[Maelwys]

20 hours ago, The Trouble said:

Then they casually complained how hard it was to keep funding their growing stable of alts. They said that farming got them about 20m per hour.

 

That's not farming, that's growing Cress on a Q-Tip.

 

Even a single non-optimized passive ("AFK") farming toon should be making more inf than that without selling any drops... 🙈

 

That said... there are so many ways to earn decent influence in this game that anyone getting annoyed at ebil marketeers for doing it a little faster/more efficiently is ridiculous. It doesn't cost more than a few days effort to fully purple out a toon even if you just earn merits + swap them for converters/boosters + dump them on the AH at "sell now" prices (you're welcome, flippers!)

 

Smack the idiot upside the head with a trout and move on.

[Luminara]

You guys talk to people?

 

...

 

Weirdos.

[tidge]

I haven't encountered that sort of response about marketeering, but I have gotten that exact sort of response by soloing (single-box) Giant Monsters... often from multi-boxers, several of whom commonly "camp" at the Adamastor summoning spot. The typical complaint is griefing somewhere on the spectrum of "why don't you invite all my characters to share the wealth?"... and I have reasons, but none of them are to "make other players poor".  As an aside: It's hard for me to take some of these folks seriously, because they have alts with names like "Scrapyard Summoner", "Adamastor Farmer", etc.

 

Like the OP's report of the complaint about using the market to grow individual "wealth", I don't think people who make these sorts of complaints are either thinking things through or paying attention to the game. The market prices have been almost entirely deflationary in the past (almost) six years. If properly dealt with, the giant monsters will be back in 2-to-4 hours, if not sooner.

 

In the specific circumstances of the OP (a conversation during some other player's farming session) it is possible that the other player has a somewhat limited PoV about the game, about builds, and about how to "afford" builds. 20 MInf is pretty easy to spend at a START vendor, but it is a very reasonable (and typical for my alts) "starting kitty" to do a little marketing and crafting while leveraging enhancements stored in the SG base. "Big Money" only comes out if I want a lot of Purples RIGHT NAO, and I suppose at the start of an alts career when I usually make the ATOs available to the new character from one of my previous characters' wealth.

[Andreah]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

The typical complaint is griefing somewhere on the spectrum of "why don't you invite all my characters to share the wealth?".

I generally try to be a good person, but I'm minded never to invite any of their characters to anything, ever, if see someone multibox farming in an open zone. "You don't need a team -- you have your own. Have fun on it."

[tidge]

I can't get worked up about multi-boxing for rewards except in the open-world... I certainly haven't enjoyed mission teaming when it turned out that one player was multi-boxing, but what happens on an instanced map can stay on the instanced map. I find it insulting when the multi-boxers criticize me for spending 5 minutes to take down a Giant Monster when their preferred approach is to spend 1 minute bringing their alts to the GM and each of them pops Lores for a sub 60-second fight. I know it takes all kinds, but fer crying out loud the Monster might have been there for up to 24 hours! Don't try to sugar-coat and attempt at multi-boxing rewards by advertising "Room for 5 (or 6)"!

 

At least while the Spring Fling is happening, and soon when the Mapserver league starts, the typical multi-box suspects are farming content other than Giant Monsters... which pretty much reinforces to me who sees the open world as a zero-sum game and who does not.

[lemming]

I do a bit of multiboxing, but the only time I'll invite others into things was early on Victory when we were lacking a bit.  Now it's not needed.  Most of the multibox stuff is just setting up some support alts for when I'm being anti-social.  

 

And I do multibox the event stuff, but never GMs.

[Ghost]

Only 20mill per hour?

Sounds like he needs advice on farming.

[Zect]

Not personally. However, the marketing forum during the days of Live sometimes had a snobbish and frequently antagonistic attitude, which you can still see for yourself if you look at archives of the forums. During live, marketeers also added far less value to the market: there was no practical converter roulette, no level arbitrage (I buy a level 10 recipe and craft it for pennies, you buy it as a level 50 enhancement, and we cheat the crafting station out of 500k in crafting fees) and nonfungible items meant certain items were perpetually in shortage. Luck charms anyone? All this led to more frustration with the market and marketeers, quite a bit of it deserved, so I'm not surprised if some people from that era still carry a lot of resentment for marketeers.

 

On 2/13/2025 at 3:34 AM, Andreah said:

marketeering doesn't cause inflation. not even "flipping".

 

Flipping undeniably causes prices of flipped items to be higher than they otherwise would be. When you buy something for X and sell it for X+Y to pocket the difference Y, the amount Y does not appear out of thin air: it's paid by someone who could've paid only X instead. This is not mutually exclusive with the observation that inflation in HC does not exist. While prices have generally remained stable or fell slightly, maybe they would fall more if flipping did not exist. Hence, lack of inflation does not change the fact that flipping skims money off the market, because many other factors also influence trends in price. Flippers do help the market function by constantly having buy orders out and stock ready to sell, however.

 

17 hours ago, Ghost said:

Only 20mill per hour?

Sounds like he needs advice on farming.

 

They may be doing a very unoptimized setup, farming with other players in a 8 person team coupled with badly played/built hitters or too many leeches. The reality is that the average farmer is pretty bad at what they are doing. In fact, I would go so far as to say the average person is generally terrible at their choice of activity whatever that might be: most people are fearful of knowledge and growth, content to do the bare minimum and unwilling to change. This can be immensely empowering, if you realize that it is very possible to excel when the average person is so bad. It will change your life to realize that with effort and drive, you can reliably place yourself in the top 5% of the human species in any field or endeavor. Luck and privilege are necessary to get into the 1%, but you can make yourself the nat 20 that nature rolled.

 

Edited Tuesday at 02:41 PM by Zect

[UltraAlt]

On 2/13/2025 at 12:33 PM, Andreah said:

I generally try to be a good person

 

I can tell by your avatar 😉 ... not that I have issues with devil girls ...  some of them are just mischievous ... 

[UltraAlt]

9 hours ago, Zect said:

During live, marketeers also added far less value to the market

 

I don't know.

I didn't get involved with the Set Market or sets in general back then, but I was turning (mostly by crafting on live) level 45 and 50 recharge reduction IOs almost as fast as I could switch between my 100+ characters back then.

Before Day Jobs, if I didn't have set place for character to park for RP reasons, they would park at the wentworths in Steel, log in and check what was sold, grab more supplies, jump down, cross the street, run over over to the university, craft, make my way back to the Wentworths, post what I had crafted, and then game for a bit or switch up to some more marketing.

 

With only 10 marketing slots per character, you could only do so much.

[Andreah]

10 hours ago, Zect said:

Flipping undeniably causes prices of flipped items to be higher than they otherwise would be. When you buy something for X and sell it for X+Y to pocket the difference Y, the amount Y does not appear out of thin air: it's paid by someone who could've paid only X instead. This is not mutually exclusive with the observation that inflation in HC does not exist. While prices have generally remained stable or fell slightly, maybe they would fall more if flipping did not exist. Hence, lack of inflation does not change the fact that flipping skims money off the market, because many other factors also influence trends in price. Flippers do help the market function by constantly having buy orders out and stock ready to sell, however.

No, it doesn't.

 

Flippers can't just set any price they want. Flippers only ever sell their wares when they are the lowest listed price at that time.

 

At best, you could argue they pay high prices for the item at their time of purchase. But in this case they're also paying suppliers more than anyone else was willing to at the time -- this encourages supply of goods, which is de-inflationary.

 

Flipping also causes an extra round of market fees to be removed from the economy, which is fundamentally de-inflationary.

 

[shortguy on indom]

• NEVER MIND WHAT YOU'RE SELLING, IT'S WHAT YOU'RE BUYING. - FUGAZI

[tidge]

I don't think 'flipping' (i.e. buy an exact item at a low price, sell the exact same item at a high price) can be considered to cause inflation (on HC)

• most items are fungible, so even other items on the market can "become" that one item
• there is always a source of more items for the market (without considering fungible and convertible nature of the market goods)

If the market niche is small, it might be possible to set/semi-control a narrow window between buy/sell prices, but the vig is working against this.

[Luminara]

On 2/18/2025 at 9:40 AM, Zect said:

the marketing forum during the days of Live sometimes had a snobbish and frequently antagonistic attitude

 

That's a polite way of describing what was the closest thing to a real-life Mos Eisley Spaceport I've ever witnessed.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 2/18/2025 at 9:40 AM, Zect said:

Luck and privilege are necessary to get into the 1%, but you can make yourself the nat 20 that nature rolled.

 

I don't roll a lot of natural 1s, but I'm definitely getting 1-3 way more than 15% of the time...

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 2/18/2025 at 9:40 AM, Zect said:

Flipping undeniably causes prices of flipped items to be higher than they otherwise would be. When you buy something for X and sell it for X+Y to pocket the difference Y, the amount Y does not appear out of thin air: it's paid by someone who could've paid only X instead. This is not mutually exclusive with the observation that inflation in HC does not exist. While prices have generally remained stable or fell slightly, maybe they would fall more if flipping did not exist. Hence, lack of inflation does not change the fact that flipping skims money off the market, because many other factors also influence trends in price. Flippers do help the market function by constantly having buy orders out and stock ready to sell, however.

 

I see a complete sea-change from Live with respect to the value of flippers, and in this case I'll define it rigidly as someone who buys all available supply at a given price and relists it, presumably at a higher price.

 

On Live, things were rigidly defined, and not fungible.  If you wanted to set a monopoly on level 10 Panacea E/R enhancements, that was pretty easy to do, even with the limited number of market slots and character slots.  

 

Nowadays, if you want to buy out an entire category and relist at a higher price, good luck, because the replacement cost of that inventory is astoundingly low.

 

That said, there are absolutely times I buy 50-500 items (and I'm not even talking salvage) if I feel that I can turn it around at a higher price because, hey, I can.