Market Discussions

You can manipulate a market as long as you can throw money at it. Or get money thrown at it.

You cannot truly control a market. as that would require you to control the source of the item.

For example. If you and only you had control over when asteroid belts respawn, then you would have control over the mineral market.

I do slight "manipulation" every now and then when I spot a chance for it, like just buying out a few cheap mods and then putting them back on the market with a slight mark up. Tried it large scale as well just to see if I could push up a price on a mod up for several days or long enough to sell my stock for a profit, took a lot of updating and babysitting and in the end gave me only a slight profit.

But here's what I've come up with during my experiments:

-Stuff you can manufacture easily is bad for manipulation but can be done small scale. If you raise the price too much, you'll get a lot of people starting manufacturing runs on it, so expect to sell your stock before people are able to notice the price increase - start their manufacturing - dump their **** on the market.

- Manipulation on deadspace mods etc lootstuff is pretty profitable but you need to keep checking on them and buy out the competition that undercut you too hard and commit to it.

- Never focus on just one item when manipulating, If someone happens to have a huge stock of that stuff and your price dickery just gave them a signal to start selling, then you are now in an everlasting price competition against some null-sec carebear who has a 5x stock compared to you and determined to sell them.

- Mark ups of over 50% attract too much competition and usually buyers will just get an item that is kinda similar if they can and you won't be able to move your overpriced items too well, so would only do manipulation with "Best in slot" items so that the alternative to that item is worse so at least people with no isk problems will buy your overpriced **** since they want the best and they want it now.

- High value items of 500mil+ have less chance of people keeping a stock of them hidden somewhere so in that sense they are a little more safer for manipulation.

that's like asking if herding can be done in full view of the sheep

Literally laughed out loud at something on MD for the first time since I can't remember when.

On GD too. I made a killing on Mack stuff thanks to simple usage of some easily manipulated spam posters who would perma-bump my posts in there. My best allies over there are T. and R. P.

pliz for stop manipulate jita, OP, price change 2 many. I cannot' buy the ships.

No, as I wrote I did not even do the "patch speculation", I finished taking profit before that and exclusively on the "Mack will be king" talks. I don't like tying tens of billions for months so I went for another route: ship sale before the patch with a markup similar to what the others would get after months of wait plus mass invented BPC sales at about 40% markup over the usual.

But hey, keep not understanding who does what and why, as I said you are of great help to whoever knows to pull your levers (and it's not just me ). Ah, mine is actually an act of kindness to you, to make you (and not just you) understand you are being influenced by people less kind than me that won't tell you about their games.

Edit: as all the well made manipulations, this was done "with the trend" (that is I knew that Macks would become king for real), this makes those manips easy and cheap to pull off as they just amplify something already going on.

Please please please please do this. A few of us can supply you with all the tech 1 cruisers you'd ever need. That, or no matter how much you invested, the price wouldn't rise to even the cost to build... lol.

CCP changed the supply of c-type frigate loot table by removing 10-12 ded1 statics per empire and replacing them with exactly 1 ded1 sig per empire. They also drop in hideout escalations, but hideouts don't accept cruisers so a lot of explorers ignore them and like all escalations, they fail to trigger a lot, and they break a lot on the way.

ie you would have to see a change to the signature spawn tables to see that item come down again, and its pushed the a-type up too. I think I still have a couple of pvp 'throns that I'll have to consider removing the item from.

Yeah, I did the exact same thing with BCs before the 1.1 patch. Built them and sold them before the patch. It still counts as patch speculation even if you're not the one speculating.

Has nothing to do with the forums, and everything to do with expected market behavior before that kind of patch.


Of course, you're free to keep claiming that profits from selling Mackinaws before their build costs skyrocketed were a result of your clever manipulation.