New to Homecoming got a few market questions

[Mansome]

Hi all, I been playing now for about 2 weekends and I am really enjoying the game compared to live servers many years ago. What I have noticed about the market is that the quantities being sold for items is way higher than expected. It almost seems like its artificial and not real market supply. The flip side to this is when purchasing you can almost always find something. On this part I am not sure if it is just lagging on the market but sometimes for IOs I will see the exact same quantities for sale and prices even the set IO levels differ. In most cases I am seeing the attuned IO going for the same as the non-attuned version. This would not be what I would consider real market demand. Are all the markets from the different named servers under homecoming linked together?

[Robotech_Master]

If you're talking about salvage, then yes—the salvage market is seeded by the developers, with units available at a particular threshold price. This is in part because the server updates were developed in an environment with a lower population, where there weren't enough people playing enough to generate enough salvage for sale. The other part is that all salvages of any given rarity come from the same "bucket," meaning that every piece of rare salvage is effectively the same as any other piece of rare salvage (and likewise for common and uncommon). If you sell a Luck Charm at the same time someone else buys a Hydraulic Piston, your Luck Charm becomes their Hydraulic Piston.

 

This means that there are no longer any unloved pieces of salvage that nobody wants because they're never used in anything—now every single rare salvage will bring the same purchase price. More importantly, it also means that nobody can buy up all the Luck Charms or some other particular kind of salvage and hoard it so no one else can get any.

 

So, that's right—if what live had was what you would consider "real market demand," this ain't it. On the other hand, it has the effect of making stuff a lot more accessible to average players and keeping prices much lower; there are no more Recipes or Enhancements that sell for billions of Inf. Now prices are much more reasonable.

[Mr. Vee]

Recipes and enhancements are also bucketed such that every level goes into the same pool. Attuned enhancements also sell for the same as any level unattuned.

[Myrmidon]

Yes, the Market is one big pool accessed by all of the servers.

[DSorrow]

4 hours ago, Mansome said:

What I have noticed about the market is that the quantities being sold for items is way higher than expected. It almost seems like its artificial and not real market supply

Salvage is seeded into the market. Commons at 5k, uncommon at 100k and rare at 1million each, IIRC. Additionally, as was said previously in the thread, when you drop in a piece of salvage into the market, it ceases to be a Hydraulic Piston and you're actually selling a common salvage.

 

4 hours ago, Mansome said:

The flip side to this is when purchasing you can almost always find something. On this part I am not sure if it is just lagging on the market but sometimes for IOs I will see the exact same quantities for sale and prices even the set IO levels differ. In most cases I am seeing the attuned IO going for the same as the non-attuned version.

All IOs (besides generics) and the respective recipes work in buckets. If you drop in a lvl 27 Positron's Blast Acc/Dam, it can be bought as a lvl 25, 50, anything in between or attuned. The most notable effect this has on the market is that many low level recipes aren't worthless anymore. What's also interesting is that thanks to converters, there's basically an endless supply of rare recipes as anything that's traditionally not worth much (sets like sleep, def debuff, etc.) can be converted into more sought after stuff, which makes bad recipes worth more and good recipes worth less, stabilizing the prices.