eryq2

Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome

I'm currently working on an Ice/Electric tanker; level 31 right now and softcapped to S/L/E/N damage. It's quite sturdy and offers considerable AOE damage at the expense of limited Single Target damage. Being Ice Armor it grabs and holds aggro extremely well; it does an outstanding job of managing team aggro.

Durability wise it's below Shield and certainly Invuln (and Stone post 32 naturally) but it has plenty for the job. While it's soft capped defensively anything that manages to get through the defense is going to hurt since it lacks a layer of resistance to back up the defense and Fire using mobs will chew it up badly. Fortunately Fire is a rare damage type and even more rare when it comes in significant amounts.

I'm also working on a Dark/Elec tanker at 24; with some IO investment I can see it getting really tough but right now it's a bit squishy. I rolled up both tankers because I wanted to try something completely different than I'd played before and couldn't decide between Dark and Ice... so I rolled one of each. Obviously the Ice tanker being in the 30's and fully IO'd out is superior to the SO'd Dark tanker at 24 but given equal investment and level I can see the Dark outperforming the Ice.

Dechs, what are you shooting for on a Dark tanker? 45% S/L def? I assume we want to punch recharge and tohit for the benefit of Dark Regen as well. Frankly I haven't worked up a build for that tank yet; I'm still at the testing and experiment stage before deciding on a final build.

Originally Posted by seebs

Good luck.

I am totally aware of what increasing gas rates mean. However, they increase because of inflation and increased costs. It's not mean people magically increasing prices because they are mean.



Basic economics. People are pretty good at figuring out what something costs, and whether they feel they can afford it. Cheaper gas means people drive more, take fewer buses, and so on.



Gas consumption was higher when gas was cheaper. A guy I know runs a bus company. You know what? When gas prices go up, his ticket sales go up with them. When gas prices go down, so do ticket sales.



EXACTLY. MY. POINT.

More expensive gas => less use of gas.
Less expensive gas => more use of gas.

If gas is cheap enough that use of gas exceeds available gas, we run out. Then there is no gas left. If gas is expensive enough that available gas exceeds use of gas, we run surplusses. Then people lower prices so they can sell their gas.

Seriously, this stuff works.

Gas prices do not come out of nowhere. Gas doesn't go to $4 a gallon because someone is mean to you. It goes to $4 a gallon because people want more gas than is available, so prices are raised so that demand drops. Then there's enough gas for the people who want it at that price.

This is really, really, consistent. This has happened in every economy in the entire world in the history of writing. If you set prices too high, you get surpluses. If you set them too low, you get shortages. If you let prices adapt to available supply and demand, supply tends to match demand, but prices fluctuate.

None of this is really debatable. Heck, in the middle of trying to argue against it, you proved the point by observing that you were less likely to do something recreational if gas prices were relatively high. That's exactly how it works.

Same thing happens in-game. Prices of IOs stabilize at a price where supply and demand roughly match at that price. If the price is too low for that, demand will be large, and people will start bidding more in the hopes of being the first person to get the next IO up on the market. If the price is too high for that, supply will be large, and people will start listing for less in the hopes of being the first person to sell an IO.

Obviously, everyone is aware that high gas prices make life hard for people who can't afford them. But gas stations which don't have any gas make life hard for people too, so we put up with supply-and-demand because it's more flexible and adaptible than rationing.

Originally Posted by seebs

No, it wouldn't. It would just mean people would use more until there wasn't any.



That is because, when gas was 99 cents per gallon, everything was cheaper, and 99 cents was actually a pretty decent price. Now, $2-4 is a pretty decent price -- in that, if you set the price any lower, people would try to buy more gas than there is to buy, and there wouldn't be any supply because people would have to lose money to sell at that lower price.



...

Okay, just a quick sanity check. You do know that gasoline is not created by magical fairies, who will create as much as you ask for and all you have to do is clap your hands and believe, right?

There are costs to obtaining gas. The prices we see in the US are not merely not-high, they're artificially low because we spend a huge amount of money subsidizing it. The costs of obtaining gas have increased since ten or twenty years ago -- both because the real difficulty of obtaining it has increased, and because inflation has made dollars worth less.



Doesn't matter; you could be talking about apples, horseshoes, or kittens. Same basic reality check applies. If you set the price too low, everything sells out. Lots of people want the numina set. Therefore, it's valuable.



Again, yes, this is what happens when you print up huge amounts of money with no change in underlying availability of items.

This is just supply and demand. I think the component you're missing is that money, too, is a thing subject to supply and demand. If there's a ton of inf, inf becomes less valuable with respect to other things. When monkey farmers brought in trillions of inf, of course prices increased. There was a lot more inf chasing a lot fewer items.

Thing is, none of this has anything to do with sellers pricing things "too high". It has to do with markets doing what they always do -- gravitating towards a price at which supply meets demand. When prices are going up, it is because supply was lower than demand. When prices go down, it is because supply was higher than demand.

Originally Posted by seebs

This is really a non-sequitur.

Here's the thing. Imagine, if you will, that gas stations were required to sell gas for, say, $0.99, because that's a Fair Price in the estimation of eryq2, Lord Of Fair Pricing.

You know what would happen? People would buy ALL the gas at $0.99, and resell it at higher prices. Because gas is worth more than that.



Riiiight.

Okay, let's try this from the top.

There is supply. There is demand. Some people HAVE numina recipes. Some people WANT numina recipes. If at price X, more people WANT the recipes than HAVE the recipes, then the price will increase. If at price X, more people HAVE the recipes than WANT the recipes, then the price will decrease.

This is not some purely arbitrary thing people make up.



Yes, yes they have. When you add a huge amount of money to a system, prices inflate. AE exploits have added trillions of inf to the market.



"Going rates" are what they are because there's at least as many people willing to pay them as there are people willing to sell at them.



Right. That is because there are not as many numina's recipes as there are people who would like to have one. If there are as many of something as there are people who would like to have it, it sells for 1-1000 or so; look at, say, computer viruses, or polycarbon.



Not really.

I have a lowbie who does very little but sell Karma -KB procs, in the level 10-20 or so range. I leave stacks of bids up on a large range of them, and I list them all for 12,345,678. People come along and bid 15-25M. Out of the last 40-50 I've sold, I've sold I think two for under 13M.

I am not raising my listing prices to match the "going rate". I list at the same price, every time.

Perhaps more importantly, let's look more closely at:



(emphasis mine)

No, merely assuming enough people want to pay that -- meaning, it'll sell at that price. Because there are more people who are willing to pay that much than there are available items.



There are no IO recipes or salvage on the market you can't get without going to the market.



Right.



I do. But instead of merely empathizing with them and assuming reality should mold itself for their convenience, or thinking about exactly one person at a time, I think about many people.

And all of them want that numina's proc, and there are a lot more of them than there are procs.

The marketplace resolves this by letting the price rise until the number of people who want procs at the price they sell for roughly matches supply. And if the price is too high, it does go down. I found a really lucrative-looking niche, stuff was selling for 25-40M. I listed a bunch at 25M, sold about half of them... and then the price dropped to about 8-10M. Whoops. Because it turns out, there was more supply than demand, and the price adapted to this.

If there really were enough supply of numina's procs, the prices would drop.

Originally Posted by Schismatrix

So if someone's government has a standing offer to buy all metals regardless of type or quality at ten cents a pound no one should be allowed to buy or sell any type of metal for more?

Yeah, good luck with that.

Originally Posted by DSorrow

Just something I noticed with a quick glance: you're soft capped even without Maneuvers so drop that and Tactics and move the Gaussian's set to Rage. You now have two free power picks, better slotted Rage and less endurance usage.

Originally Posted by Clave_Dark_5

If I wasn't such a lazy marketeer and had the billions that the Crazy 88s burn, I think I'd catch the "you guys are ruining the market!" posters and offer them 100 mill and a link to a good coupla guides if they'd promise to go away and make use of the inf and knowledge I just pointed them to.

I had originally thought I'd offer a billion, but that might encourage them to not bother.

Maybe anther SG could start up under that theme.

Edit: had to add this too. Last week I put down some low bids on the Kinetic Combat triple, level 30, for my stalker. All previous sales were at something like 110,000,000 and there were currently none available. I got one for about 45 mill yesterday.

Originally Posted by Silver Gale

Purple recipes are just "decent" now? I thought they were the highest-bonus IOs in the game that only dropped rarely and could only be reliably created after about a month of running Tip missions.



Fix'd



If the highest bid on a purple IO I want to sell is 450mil, I am literally unable to sell it for less than that on the market. If I stand around and offer it for 100 mil, I would not blame a person who buys it off of me and immediately turns around and sells it on the market.

Originally Posted by Silver Gale

Yes, how dare they notice opportunity when other people are impatient. Just because someone got a common IO recipe that sells for 75k at an NPC store and offered it up for sale for 100 inf doesn't mean you should buy it for that much.