Why I hate flippers...

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iamstryker a écrit :

I'm not saying this to be a jerk because I don't always recognize decent gear since I haven't played all builds but I am sure that I would have vendored that dagger.

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wild_captain a écrit :

seriously why anyone would pay more than 1alch for that dagger ? am i missing something?

tut tut

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Fatalflaw a écrit :

The flippers, I mean people defending flipping and scamming, are making invalid comparisons to real life economics.


Real life stores provide actual services to customers through logistics, moving goods, purchasing from manufacturers in bulk and distributing these goods.

Are logistics required in PoE? Not unless you count the waypoint in A3m to A1n
-The flipper has not performed and function to benefit the consumer.


Flippers sell through PoE.xyz as much as anyone else. It is no easier to find an item from them than it is from the original owner.
-Once again the flipper has not provided a valuable service, or any service different from the original owner.

The liquidity myth
Liquidity is somewhat valid when you are impatient and need to change currency,
-In this limited instance the flipper has provided a service and deserves their 1-2 chaos profit.

This does not work with weapons, armor, or uniques. As I illustrated.. they use any means to lowball items, then force the actual end customer to pay many times over a fair* rate.

Fair implies a rate which aligns with the scarcity* and demand for an item.

Scarcity implies the number of items in circulation when items are not methodically bought to be monopolized and price fixed.
-For reference look into the mirror price fixing fiasco when players systematically bought them and the price doubled.

I cannot understand why people are so stubborn when it comes to comparing virtual economies with actual ones.

Of course flippers provide a service. They actively look for underpriced items and, after finding and buying them, resell them to buyers with the highest valuations. They are matchmakers. They ensure that you can sell your stuff quickly. They are willing to hold your items until they find a good buyer. They are willing to engage in all the haggling you despise. They allow easy and almost direct access to the items you desire *provided* that you can match the market price. How is that not a service?

Without flipping, many items would be much harder to sell for the person who finds them (because you actually need to find someone who wants to use the item directly). More often than not, items would end up with people who do not have the highest valuation for a good, which reduces allocative efficiency (it's better for society if an item ends up with a person valuing it higher than lower). Without flippers, many mutually beneficial trades simply would never take place.

Moreover, it's a big myth that flippers cause massive inflation. Although they slightly increase transaction prices, they only do so for underpriced items. Only if an item is significantly underpriced (meaning that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to pay more then the asking price), a flipper will become active. Again, this is a matchmaking service that connects sellers and buyers with the highest valuations. Everybody gains, as otherwise the flipper wouldn't be able to resell the acquired item.

Monopolization is bad, of course. But for most goods, there is way too much competition to successfully monopolize the market. This would require a huge conspiracy and massive collusion among numerous people. However, it might be possible to monopolize very specific markets (mirrors, legacy Kaom's, etc.), but this has certainly nothing to do with the fair and valuable practice of flipping.

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CantripN a écrit :

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habkor a écrit :

Market price: the price where the quantity supplied of an item (given the price) equals the quantity demanded at that price.

What is a "hoax" about that?

In your example above, it met at 20c, not 30. Thus, for that trade, that was the price. You're assuming it's a static, or even that things have set or even intrinsic value - they don't.

I'm not assuming at all that prices are static or items have an intrinsic value. In my example, some people are willing to pay 30 Chaos for the item (implying that their valuation must be even higher than 30 Chaos!), yet it is sold at 20 Chaos to somebody valuing the item less than 30 Chaos (say 25 Chaos).

How is that fair for the buyers willing to pay more? How is that efficient? A mutually beneficial trade could occur between the 30 Chaos+ buyers and the guy valuing the good at 25 Chaos. Yet it never happens, as nobody flips and he keeps the item for himself.

Fail.

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Mr_Cee a écrit :

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habkor a écrit :

An example why flipping tends to increase efficiency:

You find item X. You do not need X. The going rate ("market price") for X is 30 Chaos, but it could take a very long while to find a buyer who needs exactly X at this point.

Yes, middlesmen can increase some efficiency of selling, indeed.
But: if X is very common/on high demand, you will find someone seeking it fast 'enough'. If not, it either has a (much?) lower real/effective value, or its too specific to just announce it in the tradechannel. There's a reason why also some trading forums exist ^^ (But using these decreases the 'efficiency' of selling, of course.... sometimes trading is a hard business... ^^

I give you an (extreme) conter-example, why its shitty as it is now:
I need X, and X has an "initial" value of 5 chaos, and X is somewhat rare... Now we assume, I have an average ingame availability of 4 hours per day, and we assume, for the example, everybody else have the same, each on his own timezone: that gives 6 timeslots without overlap, but as we have to meet, that would not working - an effective overlap of 1 hour on each slot makes it 8 slots...
If, for the worst case, we have the maximum slot difference between the initial seller of X and me, it would need 6 middlesmen to transport X to my slot, which ALL will make their profit, any may not just charge an additional C. Do you really want to pay 20C for an item that you could get for 5 - if you had the luck that you match the "right" timeslot, OR IF WE WOULD NOT NEED to care about timeslots at ALL?

This is a weird example in many dimensions, but one crucial mistake is already to assume that something like an "initial value" (intrinsic value?) of 5 Chaos exists. So good X is pretty rare and, given the thing with the time zones you described, you would actually never have the chance to buy it.

Now a flipper (or several, for some weird reason) comes and offers the good for 20 Chaos after buying it from a different time zone. So apparently there are people out there who are valuing the good for 20+ Chaos - or otherwise the flipper would never be able to sell the item. If you value it enough, you can buy it, implying a trade that is beneficial to everybody. If not, at least nothing is lost compared to the situation without the flipper, as you wouldn't have had access to the item anyway.

So where is the problem?

I agree with your last point though: obviously the market would be even more efficient (and there would be less scope for flipping) if a better trade system (allowing for asynchronous trade, for example) was implemented.

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habkor a écrit :

This is a weird example in many dimensions, but one crucial mistake is already to assume that something like an "initial value" (intrinsic value?) of 5 Chaos exists.

Not intrinsic, not fixed (in general). But the initial value is what the first ('initial') owner of an item accepts as price. May be fluctuationg, influenced by some or even many aspects, but still initial. Every item has a "first price".

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habkor a écrit :

So good X is pretty rare and, given the thing with the time zones you described, you would actually never have the chance to buy it.

If I cant expand my access to the game, and not be willing to increase what I'm willing to pay; yes then I maybe never get such things like (as the 5C-example) Wheel of the Stormsail.

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habkor a écrit :

Now a flipper comes and offers the good for 20 Chaos after buying it from a different time zone. So apparently there are people out there who are valuing the good for 20+ Chaos - or otherwise the flipper would never be able to sell the item.

What chance have I to check? That one of this items is listed in xyz did not mean that someone buys it at this price, and 'real' bartering is more or less irrelevant.
If the flipper would not exist, the seller would have to take better care about making "his" deal, investing more effort to earn the currency he needs. I already DO this (as a buyer) to match offers with an (to me) acceptable price - at least as I dont find a cheap quick deal.

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habkor a écrit :

If you value it enough, you can buy it, implying a trade that is beneficial to everybody. If not, at least nothing is lost compared to the situation without the flipper, as you wouldn't have had access to the item anyway.

It 'only' benefits both sides as far as the items were exchanged, and with every "additional fee" the "buyer" benefits less: because he pays more and more for the same equivalent. You can see it so, that without flippers people with the most available time benefit most from trades, and with them people that did not have to worry about currency ('rich' ones) catch up (long-timers can still buy cheap; and can additional gain profit bfrom flipping by themselves)
quoted again:

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habkor a écrit :

If you value it enough

Reduced Mana gem has a usual price around 2C, how high would YOU value it, if you cant match someone that dont demand 5? Would you try to get it for 1C (as some announce), why not?

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Fatalflaw a écrit :

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I would normally vendor this dagger. I play mostly physical damage characters, can someone explain to me why this dagger is worth 5c much less 15c?

For physical, it's missing +%phy and +phy. For spell it only has 19% spell damage which seems low to me. For ele, it only has one elem mod and you would want two to three ele mods.

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Dregos a écrit :

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Fatalflaw a écrit :

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I would normally vendor this dagger. I play mostly physical damage characters, can someone explain to me why this dagger is worth 5c much less 15c?

For physical, it's missing +%phy and +phy. For spell it only has 19% spell damage which seems low to me. For ele, it only has one elem mod and you would want two to three ele mods.

The dagger is a very good roll for a cast on crit build that only looks for attack speed and critical hit chance on the dagger.

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Dregos a écrit :

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Fatalflaw a écrit :

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I would normally vendor this dagger. I play mostly physical damage characters, can someone explain to me why this dagger is worth 5c much less 15c?

For physical, it's missing +%phy and +phy. For spell it only has 19% spell damage which seems low to me. For ele, it only has one elem mod and you would want two to three ele mods.

It's for COC dagger builds. Spell dmg, crit chance, and IAS all benefit the build heavily, and weapon damage is somewhat irrelevant since most damage comes from the linked COC spells.

The attempted use of 'economics' to support the value-added of flipping is hilarious, such as the one claiming the 'velocity of money' somehow supports flipping. In D3 there was a slight argument that flipping helped the seller because each seller was limited to 10 slots. Here, most sellers have a good amount of stash space, so decreasing the inventory time has very little value added. Keep in mind here flippers are just using poe.xyz so their information access is the same as any other buyer; not at all like middlemen IRL.

The concern most players have about flipping is the greater difficulty of gearing up when a player is not wealthy. Yes it does mean missing out on deals to the original seller's expense. It's not hypothetical. If you played D3 from the start, you would have experienced how it became progressively harder to gear up as more flippers (including myself, I flipped in D3 at one point) increasingly dominated the AH and open bids declined.

In my Ambush shop I have always sold cheaply and likely to some flippers. But I'm pretty sure from chatting as well as not seeing the gear immediately show up on poe.xyz that most of the time I was able to sell to someone leveling up who could use a decent price. And I've gotten good deals off of sellers who knew it too, but didn't care cause it was obvious (in Domination) I was new and were happy to help me vs a flipper.

Anyways, I don't hate flippers. I just find silly some of attempted rationalisations that the provide an important service to all

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kamil1210 a écrit :

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I like flippers because without them the economy would be slow as fuck.

This is so wrong.

Actually it is so right. Just because you don't understand economics doesn't change it.