seebs

I'm not sure of this.

I take stamina if, and only if, I tend to run out of endurance. On characters that don't run out of endurance, I'm unlikely to spend the slots. A 30% reduction in endurance consumed would likely, for most of my characters, make me not bother with stamina. Sure, it'd be occasionally useful, but it wouldn't be the difference between resting every fight and continuing through missions without stopping.

Not really, unless you have evidence to show that this isn't what would actually happen.

Certainly, in all the cases where we've seen it tried, the actual outcome is exactly what the theory predicts. Prices stabilize, and tend to go lower.

For common salvage, it effectively is -- there's too much new salvage coming in for that to be a practical strategy.

If you buy out absolutely everything at all below your listing price, you lose money if anyone sells things close to your listing price, due to WW fees.

If you don't, then sales will tend to go to people who decide to sell for 5% under the market price in the hopes of getting a quicker sale.

See above. And remember, the "net of buy orders" runs into the other half of the "lowest price sells" maxim: Highest bid buys. If you have any bids at 50k, they will ALL fill before any bids at 25k do. Meaning, if you actually want to cover "snipers", your bids all have to be at close to 85%-90% of your listing price -- meaning that you're paying 85%-90% of your listing price to people who were listing at 1 inf.

Lots of people who aren't using the market actively will just list small bits of stuff, but statistically, they're a smaller effect on the market. Unless they're listing full stacks of 10, they're not going to have the same effect per slot they use that marketers who buy and sell in full stacks do.

This is simply not true. It's not true in the game, and it's not true in real life. Read about "market makers" in the stock exchanges. That's a fancy word for "flippers", and they're regarded as one of the major tools exchanges have to keep prices comparatively stable.

Again, they're not forcing an inflated price to begin with. There is no inflated price that they are forcing.

No, there seems to be a discrepancy between what you declare is happening without a shred of evidence, and what actually happens in every market ever studied over the past couple thousand years of written history.

It's not "flipping" to buy a whole bunch of stuff and then not sell it.

Alchemical Silver tends to be a little volatile because it's extremely useful (required for many high-value recipes).

NASDAQ. Pretty much every stock exchange ever. Commodities markets -- all of them. The WoW auction house, where you can actually track the effects much more easily. CoH's auction market. Consider Nethergoat's experiment on ancient bones, back when redside was a separate market. Prices were very volatile and tended towards being awfully high. Bring in a flipper for a week or two, and prices stabilized with a lower average.

Part of this is simple, basic, mathematics: Every purchase through WW reduces the amount of inf in the market. If you reduce the amount of inf, you necessarily lower prices in the long run.

I'm too lazy to do the searches, but I can explain the mechanism.

Basically, prices tend to stabilize when there's a regular flow of buyers and sellers, and destabilize when there isn't. Long story short, that is the Big Magic.

Actually, as someone pointed out recently, a big component is the limit on WW slots. A flipper who buys and sells stacks of ten of an item is providing a lot more supply than someone who is buying and selling individual items -- about ten times as much, per slot. And slots are the major limiting factor on the market.

Here's the thing.

For the most part, sellers don't really have much effect on prices. Yeah, in theory you can ask for a price so high that... no one buys it. You have no effect. Okay, so you set a price low enough that it's reasonable. What happens? People pay a ton more than your asking price.

I wrote a little utility to, given the amount collected and amount paid, tell me what I listed stuff for. I've been comparing sale prices to the amounts I listed things for. Typically, people are paying 20-30% more than I asked. I listed a Kismet +accuracy for 14 million; I got paid 17 million. I listed something (I forget what) for 6 million; I got paid 9 million.

That's the big factor driving prices.

Keep in mind, an actual flipper -- someone trying to make money flipping -- isn't gonna waste time listing stuff for prices way outside the best available guess of the "reasonable" range for something. Sure, you can buy brass at 500 and list it at 250k. Maybe. If you're willing to wait a few weeks. If instead you buy it at 500 and list it at 10k, you'll make a LOT more money over the course of a week, because you'll actually have transactions happening. Lots of them.

Because the next sale always goes to the lowest price, no matter how much higher or lower than the bid it is, flippers must list below everyone else to get action. If your listing price isn't the lowest, you don't get a sale.

So if you take the flipper out of the picture, the remaining items for sale are at higher prices, by definition. You might argue that, hey, the ones they bought would still be there... But that's not usually how supply and demand works. There's a lot more demand for brass at 500 than there is at 10k. Lots of people will buy brass if it's under 5k, but won't buy it if it's over 10k. What that means is that low-priced supply will dry up faster. The same 2000 bars of brass will not stay on the market as long at 500 as they would at 5k, and that means that your chances of finding low-priced stuff aren't great -- it's too likely that it already sold out. (This is why economies with government-defined fixed prices for goods tend to need rationing -- because there's not enough supply to meet the demand at the made-up price.)

The other component is that a lot of people won't bother listing something if there aren't any bids up. A flipper provides a steady supply of bids, usually at a rate above what vendors will pay for an item, which means that if you have one or two of some salvage you don't need, there's buyers -- you can list and sell immediately. If there's no buyers, listing chews up one of your WW slots, so you are better off going to a vendor. (Doesn't matter that you might think you could get more from WW -- slots are more valuable than inf!)

That tends to mean that there's a lot more supply, which is being listed in stacks of 10, which means more supply per WW slot. More supply, more stability.