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Crazy price volatility ruins it for all - I've had enough

Legends

Legends

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Twin Peaks mall, 2nd floor
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Inherent Marxus Legends
I think that my chief complaint right now is that in the current paradigm, whoever is fast enough to get ahead of market cycles is who will profit, everyone else loses. What do I mean exactly:

I am now completely priced out of the Damage Enhancers market, and the high-level ArMatrix market (70-105). Why? Because in order to be able to compete in these markets, I would have had to stockpile the mats for the last couple months, BEFORE the big jump that just happened. For the Damage Enhancers, it's the Pyrite, for the high level ArMatrix it's the Ignisium.

Having failed to stockpile, do I risk it now and buy at current markups? What if this is the highest it will be and it's all downhill from here? I will never be able to recuperate my input costs because others will undercut me and my crafted goods will just sit on the shelves or in auction untouched.

This system sucks, the meta for crafters/shop owners is: Sink all your PED into materials when they appear to be at their lows, hope they go up so you can craft cheaply to your hearts content and sell sell sell for big profits. I'm tired of it. I haven't done the math on this but I probably have more than 50k ped stuck in resources in an effort to create some kind of pricing stability for myself and it's still not good enough.

Just for the sake of being very specific, let's have a look at some of this price volatility that I'm referring to:

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Here's one, Dianthus, which I've been trying to buy for the last year and a half. It used to go back down around 140% between Mayhems, not anymore. So I've been holding out in vain. I need it in order to make Aquila armor and I would also like to add Accuracy and Economy Enhancers to some of my shops, but I don't want to get screwed on the price of Dianthus, so I wait. It seems now that the new floor is 180%, with a ceiling potentially at around 260%. If it ever comes back down around 180%, I'll probably buy it again...

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This one has been the subject of a lot of discussion lately, Pyrite, for Damage Enhancers. Bascially, as soon as you buy it, you can be certain it's going to do one of 2 things; it's either going to go up, or it's going to go down. It just doesn't stay flat, it has wild swings and those swings can be very sudden at times. If you bought lots and then it goes down, you won't be able to recover your costs on the Damage Enhancers you make with it, unless you wait for it to come back up, sometimes you'd wait for a year. Sure, it seems rather predictable that the summer is the time to stock up on it, but how much of it should a person stock? Is it enough? How long will it last? What do you do once you run out?

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Used in making 12 different ArMatrix guns and Infiltrator armor. Just look at those swings! How in the hell is someone supposed to be able to do well in an environment where prices on things can fluctuate by 250%!? We are having the craziest inflation in 40 years around the world right now and we're talking about roughly 8% in some countries up to as high as 11% in others, and here we have a resource that can drop or jump as much as 250% several times per year!! Is it going to come back down again? Should I wait to buy more and just not craft those things for now...? Do you begin to see my predicament here?

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This is the one that is really infuriating me right now. For the last couple of years it was going between 120% and 140%, so I was waiting for it to come back down a bit. I never could have known that this was going to happen, and now I'm done; I can no longer make high level ArMatrix because one way or another, you need Ignisium to make the crafted components required to make them cause you need a lot of High Grade Plugs to make GeoTrek Hardened EnBolts, which is needed to make Enhanced Talytic Converters. Not to mention that you need Igni again to make Triphased Intelligence Modules. This is just a total clusterf*ck. Should I buy some now? Is it going to go even higher? Or should I wait it out?

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Here's a much more common resource: Garcen. This is used in a few different crafted components but the most popular one is Durable Hood, which is needed for making Super Alloy Mountings which is needed for making the higher level ArMatrix guns, amps and AP plates. So, in the last 12 months, we went from 120% to 160%. Then back down to 140%. When it came back down to 140%, many of us thought "Ok, let's just wait a bit more, it'll probably come down further", but NO! It went even higher! to 170%! So then when it came back down to 140%, some of us started stocking up on it since by that point it seemed like 140% was the new floor for it. Then it just kept going down! There's just no way to predict some of these, and that just creates a very volatile and chaotic environment for some of us that are just trying to run a crafting business or some shops.

So yes, in the last little while I've been posting about overhauling the Mining profession, yes I'm frustrated and no, I'm not a miner and I don't really know what is wrong with Mining. But this is NOT a healthy market for anyone to try to operate in! It ruins the game for everyone! Who benefits from such price instability??? It only reinforces market manipulation and the only people that can win in this system is people with a very good understanding of the cycles and lots of PED on their cards. While the rest of us who are just trying to get by with our shop or our crafting business pay for this, don't you see?

Please fix this damn price VOLATILITY!
 
How would people or MA stop this? Its a free market people can buy, sell, hold however and whenever they feel like. Im not hating on this I agree the price swings are affecting everyone one way or another but what can be enforced to stop this?
 
I would love to help you but with the resource cap the more I amp the less of what you need I get. And I don´t have time to mine unamped or with small amps.

Regarding Ignisium, since you are a big time crafter I strongly suggest you enquire MA about what is going on with the drop rate.
Since the Mini Mayhem started its drop rate was halved. This can be confirmed in the mineral chart of Igni in Entropia Life and myself tested the cap difference in drop rate between big/small amps. it is to big to make it worth it to amp big in times of need like these... you get the same amount of Igni of half the ped cycled. so what is the point of investing in amps?

It does not make any sense that the tools that should allow players to fix these price surges do not return any or only a fraction of the yield they should in a specific area.

At current price of Igni amping big would solve some of these issues, but the game simply does not allow to use those tools for those resources. How dumb is this??
 
Mathilda said:
Who could have predicted the demand increases around merry mayhem
Click to expand...

It is not only attributable to Mayhem; look at the spike of Dianthus last year, was that because of Mayhem? Look at the ups and downs of Antimagnetic Oil? Does every one of those spikes to 400% coincide with a Mayhem announcement? What about Garcen.

I'm not talking just about Pyrite here, I'm talking about the whole system, there's a problem. Yes Pyrite spikes on pretty much all Mayhem announcements and that's fine, but look at the rest of it and tell me it's ALL due to Mayhem, it's not. If that's the case, why is Redulite still 500%?

MA is causing volatility on purpose, it's not healthy for the economy or the game.
 
I tied to run large bankrolls to combat volatility, but I gave up too for getting burned by market swings too much and holding onto stock.

Now I just work on a day basis. What price is my item selling at today and what do my mats cost today. If it’s profitable to click I do so, if it’s not I wait for another day. I purchase only enough mats I need to click my desired quantity of items and I sell those items immediately. At the end of each crafting cycle I am out of mats and my exposure is nulified, what price swings happen in the future do not affect me.

This strategy probably doesn’t help somebody trying to keep constant stocks in a shop, but I feel it’s the only way to consistently profit crafting with minimal risk.

A fix for the price volatility could be to adjust material spawn rates based on a monthly markup/throughput on auction. Not a perfect solution but it would help.
 
you are specifically targeting the things people need for tiering. if you have 3 mod nanos and you want tier 10, you need so much ferrum nuts you would need a warehouse the size of texas to fit them all.


this is what happens when MA does not balance resources around new items.

same applies for ignisium which is the bottleneck for tier 7.

garcen used to be very very common until the shinook changes. also, none of the resources you mentioned can be found in pyrite zones, where the vast majority of miners are forced to spend their time.

i went searching for ignis and found claims kept tight to about 40-60 tt/hour. this is a typical symptom of a universe-wide threshold being reached. people need to start tiering/crafting it away if we want more. MA won't simply raise the caps.
 
Rocket192 said:
you are specifically targeting the things people need for tiering. if you have 3 mod nanos and you want tier 10, you need so much ferrum nuts you would need a warehouse the size of texas to fit them all.


this is what happens when MA does not balance resources around new items.

same applies for ignisium which is the bottleneck for tier 7.

garcen used to be very very common until the shinook changes. also, none of the resources you mentioned can be found in pyrite zones, where the vast majority of miners are forced to spend their time.

i went searching for ignis and found claims kept tight to about 40-60 tt/hour. this is a typical symptom of a universe-wide threshold being reached. people need to start tiering/crafting it away if we want more. MA won't simply raise the caps.
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Thanks, it's true that I'm not really tracking here when it comes to tiering mat requirements since I am not a professional hunter. I should be looking at that more.. But still, these swings are just nuts, we need more stability. A fluctuation of say 20%, or even 40%, fine, but not 100%, 120%, even 250%! That's just nuts.
 
Katie Chalmers said:
I tied to run large bankrolls to combat volatility, but I gave up too for getting burned by market swings too much and holding onto stock.

Now I just work on a day basis. What price is my item selling at today and what do my mats cost today. If it’s profitable to click I do so, if it’s not I wait for another day. I purchase only enough mats I need to click my desired quantity of items and I sell those items immediately. At the end of each crafting cycle I am out of mats and my exposure is nulified, what price swings happen in the future do not affect me.

This strategy probably doesn’t help somebody trying to keep constant stocks in a shop, but I feel it’s the only way to consistently profit crafting with minimal risk.

A fix for the price volatility could be to adjust material spawn rates based on a monthly markup/throughput on auction. Not a perfect solution but it would help.
Click to expand...

So you get it, thanks for that.

I think it should be a free market and in a free market, anyone can step in and fill a demand if there's money to be made, so why not put control back in the hands of miners; give them the ability to increase supply somehow, even if it's hard work, or costly, just make it possible to increase supply, at least to a point (not in an unlimited way).
 
Definitely what rocket said. When people are buying thousands of ped of tt of rarer mats all at once to tier their shit, its puts a strain on the low supply forced on the game by MA. There should be no hard hourly caps on resourceslike there is currently.
 
Hijacker27 said:
Definitely what rocket said. When people are buying thousands of ped of tt of rarer mats all at once to tier their shit, its puts a strain on the low supply forced on the game by MA. There should be no hard hourly caps on resourceslike there is currently.
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Well that's just f*cking retarded! Why anyone would design a system that way is beyond me...

So am I to understand that, when there's too much of a resource in people's hands, the system cuts the amount that can be found in the ground?

So here's what happens then:

People stockpile specific Ores and EnMatters over time for their crafting needs and tiering needs in an effort not to upset the market. The mining loot system sees this so cuts the supply by approximately half. This causes further volatility, which then forces people to hoard more in order to be successful, which causes less availability, which causes even more volatility.

Stockpiling>>reduced supply>>increased volatility>>more hoarding>>continued scarcity>>more volatility...

It's a self-perpetuating cycle of ever increasing volatility, it cannot lead to anything but increased volatility! What a shit system!
 
Mrjoseph said:
How would people or MA stop this?
Click to expand...

By overhauling mining profession, let people target mats (to a degree) by choosing location and their gear accordingly.
- MA could also rethink how extracting works - i see that as a time sink that drives casuals away

Or they could get an actual balancing manager

PS. Most of the miners are in PVP1 going for pyrite bc thats just too easy profit
 
Legends said:
So am I to understand that, when there's too much of a resource in people's hands, the system cuts the amount that can be found in the ground?
Click to expand...

And this is why the entire system of upgrading, tiering, and well apparantly many forms of crafting etc, is just fucking trash ass tastic.

Wanna know what is even more annoying, the majority of these items, are on accounts that are derelict, So not only are they just hogging place making things "rarer" but they will never likely circulate ever again, and MA never upholds the TOS and clearing accounts that has stuff on them like it clearly states it should be doing (y)


But, I feel These types of things are bound to drastically change regardless in the coming years 1-2 ahead. Given that is still a long time, it will be extremely volatile either way with UE5 coming
 
Mika said:
And this is why the entire system of upgrading, tiering, and well apparantly many forms of crafting etc, is just fucking trash ass tastic.

Wanna know what is even more annoying, the majority of these items, are on accounts that are derelict, So not only are they just hogging place making things "rarer" but they will never likely circulate ever again, and MA never upholds the TOS and clearing accounts that has stuff on them like it clearly states it should be doing (y)


But, I feel These types of things are bound to drastically change regardless in the coming years 1-2 ahead. Given that is still a long time, it will be extremely volatile either way with UE5 coming
Click to expand...

I was just thinking about my part in this, and to reinforce your point and just show how silly this system really is:

I have a stockpile of about 500 Light Liquid in storage, which has been sitting there for probably 3 or 4 years now, and do you know why I'm holding onto it? For GARDENING!!! A system that has been broken for over 5 years and which probably won't be fixed for many years still!

So I'm holding onto a pile of Light Liquid in anticipation of Gardening being fixed, which ultimately contributes to making it harder to mine, making it more scarce and more expensive for everyone... How utterly stupid is that!!

My god, we are doomed...
 
Up and down prices are healthy 👌

Learn from mistake, plan your runs and you will be ahead.
 
TheRock said:
Up and down prices are healthy 👌

Learn from mistake, plan your runs and you will be ahead.
Click to expand...

For many years now, I have been playing this game of stockpiling stuff when prices are at their lows and avoiding buying when prices were high. I do this not just with mined resources but with hunting loot as well. I actually considered I was pretty good at it and pretty successful...

But lately, it has become too volatile, the swings are too much and I cannot plan ahead anymore. The situation has become unmanageable and it's not something I can continue working with, I'm done.
 
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I respect that you say you are done, but isn't this place becoming more and more a question of bankroll? Surely you are in a good place to adapt in this respect, aren't you? Or are you saying you are being outgunned when you decide to wait longer before you buy, but then the mu rises instead?

Or you are fed up with these market dynamics I guess, the volatility where stocking product becomes too risky when providing an actual service and not 'gambling' on the markets...

Interesting discussion, though. We don't have the mechanism of short selling here, but we do have undercutting that traditionally drags mus down over time. I'd have thought it good to see movement towards better mus, and tradeability of more stuff for more players?
 
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Legends said:
It is not only attributable to Mayhem; look at the spike of Dianthus last year, was that because of Mayhem? Look at the ups and downs of Antimagnetic Oil? Does every one of those spikes to 400% coincide with a Mayhem announcement?
Click to expand...
I'll not talk about the whole topic as a whole, because it is very voluminous. But as for some EnMatters, in particular the Antimagnetic Oil, these jumps are associated with the Tiering of the top or close to top weapons by large hunters. They can't wait. They need tons and quickly. When their interests intersect with craft interests, this turns into 400%.
---
Tier 7: Light Liquid
Tier 8: Henren Cube
Tier 9: Binary Energy
Tier 10: Antimagnetic Oil
 
Aeolus said:
I'll not talk about the whole topic as a whole, because it is very voluminous. But as for some EnMatters, in particular the Antimagnetic Oil, these jumps are associated with the Tiering of the top or close to top weapons by large hunters. They can't wait. They need tons and quickly. When their interests intersect with craft interests, this turns into 400%.
---
Tier 7: Light Liquid
Tier 8: Henren Cube
Tier 9: Binary Energy
Tier 10: Antimagnetic Oil
Click to expand...
This. They seriously need to fking remove all caps on these and change the wave system so that instead of universal wide on a timer, its player based. Also most importantly increase TIER components drop rate and pyrite/ignisum. It will increase the cycle rate of players..
Stronger L weapons will become cheaper so it'll be good for casuals too. You'll sell for less MU on crafted shit but will sell at higher volume.
For instance they could add tier components as drop rate for every mayhem cat 01 = tier 1 comp and so on, have it set at a fixed % (increased with better dpp). This would allow specific targeting of tier components that you'll need to tier your weapon.

If people are more easily able to cycle their peds it means more revenue for them so I really can't comprehend how they can design a system as stupid as this...

#fixcaps&waves2023
 
I am a little torn by this... @OP

If armor is put on the AH at 100%, you buy it at YOUR rate, overbidding to what you will pay and then increase in price in many of your shops. You have done this for a long time, and you can because you are one of the most powerful traders ingame. So even when it looks like some of us may get the chance for a low priced item and maybe some MU, you bid on it.

I just have difficulty seeing how that is different from what is happening to stuff you see now being important to you.. Other crafters have raised MU's, or people putting thier value, same as you wth armor, on it.

Like your game is being played beyond your level, finally, and you don't like it... When some of us had to play your game it was OK with you.

Armor, guns, enhancers, pets... Maybe you just can't sell EVERYTHING...?

I've been waiting for months and months for some mats.... I just think even with your wealth and access to sellers and your shops, you are seeing the way some people play the game, and the increased amount of crafters/shop owners, finally affecting you.

This may be bad for the game, maybe you sell your shops and quit and withdraw... If MA is worried about that then they will start changng things. Maybe they should increase drop rates and try to control the market.

But the fact that even your amount of PED is not able to deal with the game now, just for me makes me think you are in the same boat as the rest of us...
 
I have the solution.

A Mayhem event focused on mining and a new strongbox with UL mining gear as legendary loot and mining ores as rare and uncommon and some nice rockets and some new pets aswell.

Get a new token vendor for mining gear, mining armours that increase extraction speed, gear the increase mining depth and so on.

LETS GOOOOOOOO!

@MindArkSupport|Heimdall
@MindArkSupport|Hiroshi
 
I bought 900 ped of pyrite ant outputs at the high markups yesterday.
After crafting I used 600 ped of res to get an additional 80 ped of markup
And had 35 enhancers of 1-10. Which sells for 370 ish and gave me 10 of each for my chip.
370+600+80 =1050 Cost 900.

I am not seeing the issue.

Dianthus, I stopped mining it on my land since before mayhem, where its a near 100% hit rate.
For whatever reason it seems people cant find Dianthus.

Igni is also very easy to target if you know where to go.

Its a dynamic market.
 
Why not a redulite feast like we had before but this time for pyrite/ignisium? But please put an announcement on forum or in the client loader this time.

People complain because there is no market value but also because market value is too high.


This could be well done if MA anticipated the tier upgrades demand but for that new daily values would be needed to be inserted for the caps of resources but Sally have too many bones to chew so she don't have time for that and end up only adjusting it from time to time in some VU's.
 
Globally, the following can be said throughout the topic:
We are all in equal conditions (at least I want to believe in it).
 
This is like complaining about the cost of any commodity or stocks in real life. Real-world conditions cause variation in price, as supply and demand shifts. You really can't expect them to undo that. It's RCE. It should mirror real world behavior
 
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