Okay, so I know there are a few people that are against having an Auction House or Player's Market.
So I'm here to help lay down some simple guidelines to hopefully help ease the pain of using the Market.
1. Time and Patience is your friend.
Don't be afraid to put up a bid for an item and let that bid sit for a lengthy period of time. Most of the people that will use the market will be in the "Give it to me NAO!" mentality. They will therefore pay whatever it takes to get the item they are needing as soon as possible. With time and patience you can nab that same item for a much lower price than the person who can't wait for it does.
2. Watch for trends.
You will start to notice patterns of what is being bought and sold on the Market if you spend a little time reviewing the sales history. This will clue you in to what items you want to try to purchase low and sell high on, run missions acquiring those items to sell, or spend time crafting to sell.
3. Use all available tools and options at your disposal.
If there is more than one way to acquire certain items to be sold on the Market, use them. For instance, the Mission Creator from CoH. If you ran missions in the AE you could earn enough tickets to let you purchase random rolls for recipes. Instead of just running around doing missions hoping you could get a recipe to drop, you could run the AE missions and pretty much guarantee a good recipe drop.
4. Manipulate the Market.
Now this one is a little bit more tricky, and also a little bit evil. For those that are willing or okay in doing so, you can easily manipulate the Market a bit. Basically you would again pay attention to the trends on the Market. Alchemical Silvers, for example, would sell for 250,000 to 500,000 inf a pop. So if you went to the Market and noticed that there were only 10 Alchemical Silvers for sale, buy them all up. Or as many of them as you possibly could at a range from 250,000 to 350,000. Then turn back around and dump them all back on the AH for 500,000 or more. This is also called flipping. This also raises the prices of items in high demand, as I said most people want things NAO! Another way to manipulate the Market is to keep buying up all the high demand items and holding on to them. This creates a low supply on the Market and a high demand from the players. Once sufficient time has gone by on said item, place them back into the Market at an extremely high price. People will pay it, as they have been waiting FOREVER to get that item.
Now #4 may be a little bit more difficult to do in CoT than it was in CoH. This will depend on what kind of History information is available to us on said Market from CoT. CoH was easy to manipulate because they only gave us the last 5 transactions. So if people saw the last 5 transactions for Alchemical Silvers were at 250,000 inf, that is the amount that they would put in to try to get them at. If they saw it was at 500,000, then they would put in 500,000. Again, most people are the type of "Want it NAO!". Also depending on how the Market is implemented there could be NPC's that will help regulate the supply and demand in trying to keep Market manipulation down.
So there you have it. A few simple guides to follow that might help make the Market work FOR you instead of AGAINST you.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
As an example of how to implement 1,2, and 4 that has specificity, I offer my experience with End Mod: +end.
I noticed that they would generally sell at 20 mill so I would post them at that
But I recognized the sell it nao crowd would undercut me and occasionally sell it at 8 mill or less. I therefore set up a buy order at 8000001. This is called setting a floor.
Then I noticed the recipes were going for less. I put in a buy order at 7000001.
From there, I was able to turn resales into inf to purple out my mains. Can you say AMEN?
Edit: the name of this set was performance shifter
I was in Wentsworths one day when I noticed one of the Mu items had hit 5 million INF. I knew it was crazy, but I put in a bid to buy 10 at half the price vendors normally paid (as I recall, vendor price was 5000 so I would have bid 2500). I let it sit there for about three days. When I went back, the item was selling for 2.5 million and I had seven of them. I canceled the bid for the other three and put the 7 on the market for 2.75 million. When I went back an hour later, they had all sold.
I used the money to finish out a set of Mastermind-specific pet enhancements with strong bonuses.
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