Salvages price getting crazy!

[DSorrow]

2 hours ago, Jeagan said:

And this thread brings to light why having inf farmers is bad. Since inf is generated infinitely, there is no cap on the amount in circulation. So, inf farmers drive up inflation at a ridiculous rate. Honestly I think AE shouldn't give inf. Imagine Germany's economy after WW1, where you had to spend 10,000 marks for a single loaf of bread. The more currency available in the market, the less each piece of currency is worth.

This isn't entirely true as there are several safeguards against hyperinflation already in place. To name a few:

• WW fees eating 10% of every transaction
• 1 merit can be bought for 1 million inf which puts a soft cap on all enhancement prices for any rational player
• Seeded salvage at 25k/100k/1m
• Enhancement converters stabilizing the price gap between low and high demand items

Contrasting things to what we had back on the official servers, prices are actually incredibly low and stable, and with the safeguards in place, it's basically impossible for the prices to rise beyond certain plateaus.

[Hopeling]

2 hours ago, Rylas said:

 

Capped prices? I dare either of you to bid on rare salvage for 2 million and report back if you get 1 million refund for going over the cap. 

 

"Capped" as in the server generated millions of rare salvage listed for 1m apiece. You can bid more than that if for some reason you want to, but the going rate will never exceed 1m, because at that price point, supply becomes effectively unlimited.

[Yomo Kimyata]

10 minutes ago, Hopeling said:

"Capped" as in the server generated millions of rare salvage listed for 1m apiece. You can bid more than that if for some reason you want to, but the going rate will never exceed 1m, because at that price point, supply becomes effectively unlimited.

Never?!?  All we have to do is to accrue enough inf to buy out the cap!  Lemme see, 1mm X 10mm = oh.  I guess I'm ok with "never".

[Hopeling]

3 hours ago, Jeagan said:

And this thread brings to light why having inf farmers is bad. Since inf is generated infinitely, there is no cap on the amount in circulation. So, inf farmers drive up inflation at a ridiculous rate.

Only if influence enters the economy faster than it leaves. Prices seem pretty stable over the last few months; if anything, the overall trend has been slightly deflationary.

 

On live, you were correct: influence entered the economy via farmers, and basically never left. The only meaningful influence sink was AH fees. That's why purples cost hundreds of millions of inf apiece. On Homecoming, that is no longer true; there are multiple significant influence sinks. Super Packs are a big one: a farmer can create a hundred million inf in an hour, but I can destroy that in five minutes by opening Super Packs, and I'm incentivized to do so because it turns a profit.

 

In fact, I suspect the (fixed) price of Super Packs itself has a significant stabilizing effect. Right now, they're kind of on the edge of profitability - you can turn a profit by buying Super Packs and selling the contents, but you need to work in pretty high volumes for it to be reliable. If IO prices went up 25% while Super Packs stayed at 10m apiece, they would offer huge profit margins, and lots of people would start buying super packs - which takes lots of inf out of the economy, and increases the supply of almost every high-demand item.

[Trademarked Name]

With nightly raids (like Hamidon) where 100+ people are scooping in 200 reward Merits each night, I sort of expected the market to be flooded with purple sets the past few weeks, and prices to drop drastically from the 20's (purples can cost 19m to 25m). But it appears that when people get 200 merits in an evening, instead of fabricating they are mostly buying converters and catalysts and selling those to minimize overhead of fabrication material costs. And in fact sales of purples seemed to increase and availability of them seemed to drop.

I find it a very interesting study in economic dynamics, in inflation/deflation and supply/demand. Especially in an economy driven by not "need" (You don't need influence for food, clothing, shelter or utilities), but for "want".

[EverStryke]

Post holiday weekend. Ppl trying to set out their toons.

[TheAdjustor]

6 hours ago, Jeagan said:

And this thread brings to light why having inf farmers is bad. Since inf is generated infinitely, there is no cap on the amount in circulation. So, inf farmers drive up inflation at a ridiculous rate. Honestly I think AE shouldn't give inf. Imagine Germany's economy after WW1, where you had to spend 10,000 marks for a single loaf of bread. The more currency available in the market, the less each piece of currency is worth.

I am sorry but you are mistaken.  Solo Farmers are if anything deflationary because they have highest Goods/Inf production ratio. Teams are the problem seeing as while everyone doesn't get as much overall, there is considerably more inf generated /(kill- salvage- recipe)

[Sakai]

8 hours ago, quixoteprog said:

I was under the impression that you can email inf to ANYONE, if you know their global chat-handle. Is that not correct?

Yes.  If you know the global you can send items/influence to anyone. 

Edited September 4, 2019 by Sakai

[Mr. Vee]

8 hours ago, Bukatti said:

 

 

hahahaha sorry my bad english

and here i was blaming your phone 😛

[Clave Dark 5]

22 hours ago, MunkiLord said:

It's temporary due to the long weekend causing a spike in demand. Prices will go back down, I juts picked up all my rare salvage for less than 470k each.

This.  It also goes up or down depending on time of day, I play at night often and see this a lot.

[LordSqueak]

People are just impatient with waiting, so they place higher bids to get the salvage Now!,, result is prices go up, and other people place higher bids, and everyone has to pay more, or wait for a slow period to have their bids accepted. 

After crafting for a bit, it certainly seems like the market has a cooldown timer whenever someone places a higher than norm bid, causing a delay in the purchase. I normally bid around 450-475k and just wait for a minute, and that usually does the trick. 

[THEDarkTyger]

On 9/3/2019 at 11:06 AM, Jeagan said:

And this thread brings to light why having inf farmers is bad. Since inf is generated infinitely, there is no cap on the amount in circulation. So, inf farmers drive up inflation at a ridiculous rate.

Gotta remember the high sell prices actually benefit lowbies dumping salvage on the AH....

[Zodai]

On 9/3/2019 at 1:06 PM, Hopeling said:

Only if influence enters the economy faster than it leaves. Prices seem pretty stable over the last few months; if anything, the overall trend has been slightly deflationary.

 

On live, you were correct: influence entered the economy via farmers, and basically never left. The only meaningful influence sink was AH fees. That's why purples cost hundreds of millions of inf apiece. On Homecoming, that is no longer true; there are multiple significant influence sinks. Super Packs are a big one: a farmer can create a hundred million inf in an hour, but I can destroy that in five minutes by opening Super Packs, and I'm incentivized to do so because it turns a profit.

 

In fact, I suspect the (fixed) price of Super Packs itself has a significant stabilizing effect. Right now, they're kind of on the edge of profitability - you can turn a profit by buying Super Packs and selling the contents, but you need to work in pretty high volumes for it to be reliable. If IO prices went up 25% while Super Packs stayed at 10m apiece, they would offer huge profit margins, and lots of people would start buying super packs - which takes lots of inf out of the economy, and increases the supply of almost every high-demand item.

Do you mind if I ask a curious question?  What are the other inf sinks in the game?

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 9/3/2019 at 12:06 PM, Jeagan said:

And this thread brings to light why having inf farmers is bad. Since inf is generated infinitely, there is no cap on the amount in circulation. So, inf farmers drive up inflation at a ridiculous rate. Honestly I think AE shouldn't give inf. Imagine Germany's economy after WW1, where you had to spend 10,000 marks for a single loaf of bread. The more currency available in the market, the less each piece of currency is worth.

I agree with you in theory.  There is probably at least 5-10 times as much inf in the system as there was two months ago.  Inf farming is exactly like printing money in your basement then going out and spending it on breakfast at the diner and paying your rent.

 

However, prices have not increased tenfold on, well, anything. In fact prices have dropped on just about everything.  In my opinion, this is because demand has dropped for recipes and IOs, and supply has increased.

 

The simple reason why rare influence prices are higher is that perceived demand is higher and supply is lower.  In another thread it was posited that merit farmers are buying purple recipes which need rare salvage.

 

if people farmed AE for tickets, they could trade them for rare salvage and sell them. But instead, people will complain about how they have to pay 600k for something they had to pay 500k for yesterday.

[Yomo Kimyata]

12 minutes ago, Zodai said:

Do you mind if I ask a curious question?  What are the other inf sinks in the game?

 

I think the primary one, which dwarfs the super packs, is the 10% sales tax.  

 

Anything you you have to pay inf for at the P2w vendor.  AH transporters.  Anything you purchase from a vendor.

[Hopeling]

32 minutes ago, Zodai said:

Do you mind if I ask a curious question?  What are the other inf sinks in the game?

Technically there are many, like crafting fees and inspiration vendor prices. But these are mostly insignificant compared to the amount of influence that level 50 characters can generate. The other major one is AH fees, and with converter flipping being so popular, I think AH fees might be taking more inf out of the economy than they did on live.

[Heraclea]

The long term trend of this like any other closed game economy is inflationary.  I was not at all surprised to see these prices spiking.  Been looking for an excuse to play more creative AE stories for ticket farming anyways.  I knew that strategies for market avoidance still made sense.  Inf is inherently a poor store of value; rare salvage and crafted enhancements in a SG base are good stores of value. 

[DSorrow]

9 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Inf farming is exactly like printing money in your basement then going out and spending it on breakfast at the diner and paying your rent.

I mostly agree but I can't avoid wondering how the huge rate of recipes the farmers print out relate to this. Considering that the drop rates (per mob) are the same for a farmer and a whole 8 man team while the 8 man team makes 2.5x the inf (total), the farmer generates 3.2x the drops per inf relative to an 8 man team. If I'm not crazy, this should have a pretty deflationary effect as the number of units of transaction (inf) increases slower than the amount of goods for trade. In a sense, they're printing money and gold reserves at the same time.

Edited September 5, 2019 by DSorrow

[Yomo Kimyata]

17 minutes ago, DSorrow said:

I mostly agree but I can't avoid wondering how the huge rate of recipes the farmers print out relate to this. Considering that the drop rates (per mob) are the same for a farmer and a whole 8 man team while the 8 man team makes 2.5x the inf (total), the farmer generates 3.2x the drops per inf relative to an 8 man team. If I'm not crazy, this should have a pretty deflationary effect as the number of units of transaction (inf) increases slower than the amount of goods for trade. In a sense, they're printing money and gold reserves at the same time.

In theory, the inf multiplier is as high as 10x.  You spend 30 seconds farming and make 1mm.  You spend that on two pieces of rare salvage that I am selling, and now I have 900,000 to spend on an Entropic Chaos IO.  Now someone else has 810,000 to spend and so on.  Of course, this can leave the system at any time; if the third person spends 810,000 on crafting fees, that's gone.

 

So my question is, if someone farms 100mm, what is the average market value of the drops they are getting?  If it is more than 1bn, then we're in a deflationary environment.  If it is less than 100mm, then we are in an inflationary environment.

 

I'm not worried about the increased amounts of inf entering the system, because I think that the supply of anything you can spend it on will continue to rise while the demand for such goods will wane.  So I think people will be sitting on increasing piles of inf that they don't need to spend since there is already so much supply.  I'd love it if prices doubled or quintupled, but I'd bet against it.

[DSorrow]

6 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

So my question is, if someone farms 100mm, what is the average market value of the drops they are getting?  If it is more than 1bn, then we're in a deflationary environment.  If it is less than 100mm, then we are in an inflationary environment.

True, but for the same number of drops an 8 man team would generate 250 million inf so at the very least farming (or soloing in general) causes less inflation than playing in 8 man teams, even if farmers can't get us into the deflation zone.

[Robotech_Master]

On 9/3/2019 at 4:17 PM, Rocketeur said:

With nightly raids (like Hamidon) where 100+ people are scooping in 200 reward Merits each night, I sort of expected the market to be flooded with purple sets the past few weeks, and prices to drop drastically from the 20's (purples can cost 19m to 25m). But it appears that when people get 200 merits in an evening, instead of fabricating they are mostly buying converters and catalysts and selling those to minimize overhead of fabrication material costs. And in fact sales of purples seemed to increase and availability of them seemed to drop.

 

Not exactly a surprise, there. Anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention would realize that they could earn several times as much Inf selling converters, catalysts, boosters, etc. as you could by selling a purple. Which means they could buy several purples for themselves with the proceeds of enough merits to make just one. Why on earth wouldn't someone serious about blinging out their toons try to get the most bang for their merit?

[jubakumbi]

12 minutes ago, Robotech_Master said:

Why on earth wouldn't someone serious about blinging out their toons try to get the most bang for their merit?

 

Mostly, because I don't care about in-game resources, I will just earn more the next time I play.

 

While I do try and not make bad mistakes, I am in no way interested in spending my gaming time worrying about virtual pennies that I can easily get by playing the game.

I make builds with soft-capped defences and all the bling, without having to pour over the minutae of squeezing out the maximum profits.

 

As I have stated elsewhere, when I am playing I want to play CoH, not Market Trader or Influence Maker.

I know that IS the game for many people and that is cool.

 

Just wanted to toss out the perspective ... lots of ways to play ... without being a slave to the market minutae.

[Trademarked Name]

1 hour ago, Robotech_Master said:

Not exactly a surprise, there. Anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention would realize that they could earn several times as much Inf selling converters, catalysts, boosters, etc. as you could by selling a purple. Which means they could buy several purples for themselves with the proceeds of enough merits to make just one. Why on earth wouldn't someone serious about blinging out their toons try to get the most bang for their merit?

Amount of work surprises me. 100 merits = 300 converters. 1 converter may sell for 90k infl. so x300 = 27 mill influence (assuming you get top of market) but that means listing 300 items and waiting for those 300 to sell. You can make 1 purple and sell it for about the same as 300 converters (Minus the craft cost and 1.5 mil influence in salvage) with way less work. Catalysts sell for 4 Mil (? Guessing, I haven't bought a catalyst in many weeks and I don't exactly remembre how much I paid then), but they cost 20 merits I think. So you only get 20 Mil influence for turning 100 merits into catalysts and listing 5 of them.  The return on your time and merit investment seems heavy to purple benefit. Did I mess-up my math somewhere?

When I'm hungry for a sandwich I don't go buy seeds to grow wheat so I can harvest wheat to make flour to bake the bread to make a sandwich. I go and buy bread and make a sandwich, even if you want to argue that buying the wheat seeds is much more bread for the money.

[Hopeling]

Typing /ah and dragging over a bunch of salvage is often easier than figuring out which salvage to buy and zoning to find an invention table. For really high merit counts, boosters offer a similar return to converters with far less clicking.

[MunkiLord]

14 minutes ago, Rocketeur said:

Amount of work surprises me. 100 merits = 300 converters. 1 converter may sell for 90k infl. so x300 = 27 mill influence (assuming you get top of market) but that means listing 300 items and waiting for those 300 to sell. You can make 1 purple and sell it for about the same as 300 converters (Minus the craft cost and 1.5 mil influence in salvage) with way less work. Catalysts sell for 4 Mil (? Guessing, I haven't bought a catalyst in many weeks and I don't exactly remembre how much I paid then), but they cost 20 merits I think. So you only get 20 Mil influence for turning 100 merits into catalysts and listing 5 of them.  The return on your time and merit investment seems heavy to purple benefit. Did I mess-up my math somewhere?

When I'm hungry for a sandwich I don't go buy seeds to grow wheat so I can harvest wheat to make flour to bake the bread to make a sandwich. I go and buy bread and make a sandwich, even if you want to argue that buying the wheat seeds is much more bread for the money.

If you list them in stacks of ten you only have to set the price once then click and press enter for the rest. It's really not that much work. It's how I do it when I post 10-60 of the same enhancement at a time.

 

I haven't done any research on which method is more profitable as I use all my merits for converters since I play converter roulette for my profits.