Auction House Question

[Jacke]

13 hours ago, Ukase said:

Look here:

 

How quaint.  😺

 

Pre-Shutdown, the Auction House without the current QoL changes was a way way WAY differently priced place.

 

Supplies of stuff was lower.  With Invention and SOs being awkward to use and Level-limited, everyone wanted IOs as they Levelled and thus Accuracy IOs.  Apparently not enough were playing arcs that had Luck Charms dropped as loot.  Because that one piece of Common Salvage was usually priced from a few to Tens of Millions of Inf.  Rare Salvage was always in the Tens of Millions and the price went up and down a lot.  PvP Recipes were much rarer and sold off-AH for prices in the Billions of Inf.

 

Seriously, that HO rarity has a know solution: Allow HOs to be Converted.  However, I've heard for some internal reasons, there are drawbacks to doing that.  Sigh.

 

 

[GM Crumpet]

The prices are generally pretty stable. apart from things that are hard to get anyway like D-Synchs. We seed salvage when needed, at high but not stupid prices. So there is a ceiling on salvage prices. If it became super inflationary I have no doubt cipher would seed whatever it was that was going berserk to cool it down and bring it under control. In all the time HC has been going there has never been a need, but we do have the tools available if it became necessary. 

[tidge]

4 hours ago, Jacke said:

Seriously, that HO rarity has a know solution: Allow HOs to be Converted.  However, I've heard for some internal reasons, there are drawbacks to doing that.  Sigh.

 

I can understand what might be getting in the way of HO/DS/Titans from being converted.... but that shouldn't prevent them from being crafted.

 

I'd prefer the conversion of course, since that smooths out the economy, and makes some of the stinko drops (whup whup  Damage/Recharge) more useful.

[UltraAlt]

On 11/24/2025 at 1:57 AM, JCServant said:

I was having a conversation with a friend, who expressed concern about others who might corner the market...basically buying all of something up and reselling it at a significantly higher rate.  Out of curiosity, is this something against the rules and are there repercussions for doing so?

 

No. It is not against the rules.

But, as others have stated, the person doing so won't often get the profit margin they may be expecting and even might go into a loss.

 

17 hours ago, The Trouble said:

Wait... this is flipping?  I've been misusing the term in CoH context, then.  Now I understand the skepticism when I claimed this was a profitable enterprise.

 

Well, "flipping" isn't necessarily "buying up all of something up". It is buying something at one price and selling it for a higher price regardless of the quantity.

 

19 hours ago, knightowl - Pinnacle serve said:

Do 'ebil marketeers' self-declare, or are they 'outed' by someone behind the scenes after filtering and sifting thousands of transactions?

 

 

 

20 hours ago, Arbegla said:

Isn't this because most* threat affecting powers are autohit? 

 

No threat powers are autohit in PvP. Not that all that much PvP goes on.

 

 

21 hours ago, Arbegla said:

Due to converters dropping like regular drops, its possible to convert anything you get into what you need, and impossible to corner anything for very long.

 

That and being able to buy such a wide variety of things with merits.

 

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 03:13 PM by UltraAlt

[tidge]

38 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

No threat powers are autohit in PvP. Not that all that much PvP goes on.

 

Also to expand:

 

The threat powers from the Presence pool are not autohit (and at least one of those two must be taken to unlock the 4th/5th powers)

Some (most?) aura toggles with a Threat component accept accuracy (and threat) slotting.

There are a handful of powers in other sets that include pets/pseudopets that provide Threat, and pets/pseudopets typically also require Accuracy

 

There are possibly more powers that accept both Threat and Accuracy than there are that accept both Defense and Resistance, or EndMod and Healing, or Defense and Healing. I mention this only because those combinations (of attribute enhancing) are occasionally mention as candidates for "HO/DS" treatment

 

IMO the Provocations (Threat/Acc/Recharge) are in the same category as Cytoskeletons (End/+Def/+ToHit)... there are a LOT of powers that benefit from only two attributes, but relatively few that benefit from all three... but for those that benefit from all three, there aren't any pieces with those combinations, let alone pieces that exist at 50 that could be boosted. These pieces have something else in common: The powers that benefit from them typically don't need many slots to achieve maximum effectiveness, so missing out on set bonuses (when only 1 or 2 pieces will do) is an easy trade off for better enhancement values.

[Mopery]

I swear it's just a Merger, it's not a Monopoly! 😏

[The Trouble]

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

 

Well, "flipping" isn't necessarily "buying up all of something up". It is buying something at one price and selling it for a higher price regardless of the quantity.

I got that part, but I do appreciate you wanting to clarify the point.  Especially after my years-long misuse of the term 🤦‍♂️

 

What I thought "flipping" was: Buying unpopular crafted enhancements for below the crafting cost, then converting them to more sought-after enhancements.

 

I thought of it like house flipping.  Buy a cheap house, do some quick renovations, then sell.

[UltraAlt]

3 hours ago, The Trouble said:

What I thought "flipping" was: Buying unpopular crafted enhancements for below the crafting cost, then converting them to more sought-after enhancements.

 

I thought of it like house flipping.  Buy a cheap house, do some quick renovations, then sell.

 

That is flipping as well.

 

I would also consider crafting an enhancement, placing it on the market, taking that money, and buying an attuned one at a lower price than you made on the sale of the item to be flipping as well.

[Andreah]

20 hours ago, Ukase said:

No comment

 

[Andreah]

I hate it when I accidentally double-post.

Edited Tuesday at 09:35 PM by Andreah

[Andreah]

11 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

The prices are generally pretty stable. apart from things that are hard to get anyway like D-Synchs. We seed salvage when needed, at high but not stupid prices. So there is a ceiling on salvage prices. If it became super inflationary I have no doubt cipher would seed whatever it was that was going berserk to cool it down and bring it under control. In all the time HC has been going there has never been a need, but we do have the tools available if it became necessary. 

I've been tracking prices of some highly sought items since HC launch, and we actually have slow deflation.

Your average Billion-High-Pile-of-Inf buys more today than that did did last year, and especially years ago.

Part of the problem is we have a lot of player who just like to stash it away to gloat over. Muahaha! :D  -- The amount of Influence that actually circulates has been dropping on a per-player/alt/build basis, and that's driving down prices.

[golstat2003]

4 hours ago, Andreah said:

I've been tracking prices of some highly sought items since HC launch, and we actually have slow deflation.

Your average Billion-High-Pile-of-Inf buys more today than that did did last year, and especially years ago.

Part of the problem is we have a lot of player who just like to stash it away to gloat over. Muahaha! 😄 -- The amount of Influence that actually circulates has been dropping on a per-player/alt/build basis, and that's driving down prices.

 

I'm actually contemplating building a base to store rares I get.

[srmalloy]

5 hours ago, Andreah said:

I've been tracking prices of some highly sought items since HC launch, and we actually have slow deflation.

It's not a crafting material, but I remember when I first joined Homecoming, you could reliably sell Essence of the Earth inspirations for 10,000 inf, and now I see sale histories running around 10-100, with the track record of selling the extras I get during a Hami raid showing the occasional 500, or even more rarely 1000, but not more than that, with occasional sale history runs as low as 1.

[Andreah]

1 hour ago, golstat2003 said:

I'm actually contemplating building a base to store rares I get.

In an inflationary economy, that's a value-loser. Imagine you had a bunch of rares, a bin's worth -- 100 of them. You could keep them for a year, and you'd still have those 100 rares. 

 

Now imagine you sold them today, and they were worth 5 million each, and got 500 million inf, which you set aside in some clever way for a year. After a year, you decide to buy rares. Their prices have declined to 4 million each (we don't have that fast of deflation, but it illustrates the point), so you 500 million inf would buy 125 of them -- a net gain of 25.

 

In an inflationary economy it makes sense to buy assets to store instead of cash. This makes inflation worse of course, by keeping all the money in circulation.  In a deflationary economy, the opposite it true, which also makes deflation worse :D

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 11/25/2025 at 4:41 PM, Andreah said:

The amount of Influence that actually circulates has been dropping on a per-player/alt/build basis, and that's driving down prices.

 

I'd like to hear more about this.  My personal conjecture is that prices of items have dropped because items are being supplied faster than items are being demanded, not because there is a decrease in available money supply, but my mind is open.

[Andreah]

14 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

I'd like to hear more about this.  My personal conjecture is that prices of items have dropped because items are being supplied faster than items are being demanded, not because there is a decrease in available money supply, but my mind is open.

They're two sides of the same balance. Whether the money supply is sufficient to keep prices stable or not can only be judged in context of the supply of goods. Ordinarily, those goods would be created by drops from active play, and be accompanied by Inf drops as well. Let's say money wasn't being hoarded - then, the goods (the ones actually in demand and not sold to a vendor -- those are just Inf drops, one step removed) would be accompanied by the Inf needed to buy them. But demand isn't just having money, if there's nothing to be done with the goods, then demand for them will drop. E.g., imagine if everyone stopped playing new alts, and just stayed playing completed-50's. Everyone would pile up money, and still not need to spend it. The huge numbers of items going up for sale would find few buyers, and prices would drop in a race to the bottom at vendor prices.

I think we're seeing some of this, but unless HC datamined the rate of alt creation/leveling, it's hard to definitively say.

 

[tidge]

Influence is always being created... pretty much whatever a player is doing (ignoring players only playing 1-49 with 2XP)... so this model doesn't really make sense to me, except in this context: Almost everything on the AH is easily available, much of it is trivially available... so there isn't IMO much holding up prices except demand. We used to have incredibly high demand... I'm not sure that the demand is at previously high levels. This could be fewer new characters, fewer players, a higher percentage of players who don't need to use the market... any combination really.

 

There absolutely are players who "hoard inf"... or rather "accumulate Inf for the sake of Inf"... that is pretty much the casual definition of an Ebil Marketeer (and to some, AEternal Farmers). It's not much different than collecting badges IMO, just one more part of the game. Without the AH, massive Inf accumulation/time really only takes off above level 45... and even then only with increased spawn sizes... so eventually every player (minus the "I only play to level N" crowd) is going to get there.

[Neiska]

Personally, I don't buy a whole lot these days. Mostly because by now I have several copies of anything important like purple sets and ATO's. Whenever I want to make a new character, I often check my storage and/or old alts I no longer play and often enough I can fully equip a new character entirely for free. At most I may need to buy some un-slotters with merits, but that's about it. And since I run AE often, the inf I do have really only keeps growing to the point I no longer really even keep track of it. At this point anything I do put up for sale I just put up for like 1000 inf because it's not worth my time to go searching for the price of each and every 40+ item each time I pause to do some housekeeping. I would rather just make a profit and move on with my activities. 

 

A lot of the time, it isn't how much inf/money you make, it's how much you spend. If you don't spend much, then anything you make is a net gain. It's really kind of win-win.