Flipping is amazingly profitable in POE

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1up1up1 wrote:

This calls arbitrage, buy low sell high. when you get to certain level and waiting for a new content, this is another way of 'game' you can play. However, you need to take risk of it of buying a 'high risk' item. Of 'cos if you can buy low on 'hot' item (e.g. BoR, AA, Andv), then you can make a very good 'profit'.

Many are referring to financial theories when talking about these game markets (PoE, D3 ect), but it sometimes gets mixed up.

Flipping is not arbitrage as you stated because you would take risk by holding the item (as you correctly stated). Arbitrage comes when two perfect substitutes have a price-difference and you can simultaneously buy and sell (short and buy) the item, or “asset”. This neutralizes the risk exposure because you never have possession of the item.

Flippers are market makers who “makes the market”, just as you have financial institutions “making the market” for stocks. You achieve this by having a “bid” and “ask” price. Flippers "help" items achieve the equilibrium price in a supply/demand environment.

Sorry, that was very off-topic, but hopefully someone found it interesting.

If you have 30 ex to play around with flipping, it means you are rich already...

The rich get richer? Always true.

Another work? thx i play for fun.

The reason that flipping (what I call shopkeeping) is profitable is that it's a pain in the butt to sell stuff. So few want to do it. The economy finds a happy profit margin. D3 discovered that an AH removes this difficulty and everyone can sell items easily, but for virtually no profit and all the shop keepers go on to other games. It has to be difficult to trade for there to be a role to play as a shopkeeper.

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Hell_Bovine wrote:

The slow and painful nature of trading creates a large price discrepancy between sell and buy values because of ordinary players' desire to trade for what they want quickly.

And that kiddies, is how you get rich in POE. Good luck.

You don't know much of this game do you? Or it's economy or it's trading system.

Let me put it this way;
for flipping to be effective you need efficient and global selling system (yes, AH) and some general, available and universally accepted currency (yes, gold) - gold is not mandatory but it's helpful.

This game has neither. Trading is pure pain, it's slow and horribly inefficient. You lose hours for actually making several trades. 90% of guys selling good sh*it are often offline. 90% of guys who actually are online are selling overpriced or unusable crap nobody wants, day after day. In order to connect guy who has specific need with guy that has goods and reasonable price, miracle needs to happen.

Flipping? In PoE? I would be rather pulling my own teeth, more fun there.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The reason that flipping (what I call shopkeeping) is profitable is that it's a pain in the butt to sell stuff. So few want to do it. The economy finds a happy profit margin. D3 discovered that an AH removes this difficulty and everyone can sell items easily, but for virtually no profit and all the shop keepers go on to other games. It has to be difficult to trade for there to be a role to play as a shopkeeper.

This.

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Thorien_Kell wrote:

for flipping to be effective you need efficient and global selling system (yes, AH) and some general, available and universally accepted currency (yes, gold) - gold is not mandatory but it's helpful.

This game has neither. Trading is pure pain, it's slow and horribly inefficient. You lose hours for actually making several trades. 90% of guys selling good sh*it are often offline. 90% of guys who actually are online are selling overpriced or unusable crap nobody wants, day after day. In order to connect guy who has specific need with guy that has goods and reasonable price, miracle needs to happen.

Flipping? In PoE? I would be rather pulling my own teeth, more fun there.

You have things exactly backwards. Shagsbeard's post goes a good way towards explaining why.

Flippers and farmers form a symbiosis. The flipper depends on farmers not being as skilled at playing market simulator, or simply not being willing to; the farmer depends on the flippers to be there immediately to buy their items (even if it's below market) and to sell them items (even if it's above market), the point being availability and convenience, thus not having to deal with the trading system directly themselves. It's the same as the supplier-middleman-customer relationship in real life.

In real life, cutting the middleman is normally a good thing. But games aren't about pure optimization; they are about throwing the player curveballs, making things difficult enough where perfection is impossible. Games are the place where "too easy" is a bad thing.

When trading is made too easy or farming made too hard, you end up with a Diablo 3 system — every farmer also becomes a trader, and due to the lack of flippers the items found sell too high and the item bought are bought too low, leading to a feeling that trade rather than farming is the path to wealth (since you are so much more likely to buy your upgrade than find it). When trading is made too hard and farming made too easy, you end up with an essentially self-found system — trading rarely or never occurs, and players depend entirely on the mercy of RNG.

Good game design provides challenges to both styles of play, without making either impossible. It's not good design to make farming harder by deliberately downgrading the UI or by adding severe, almost impossible gearchecks; instead, the best method is to add challenges which test a player's skill at the game, allowing skilled farmers to succeed where the unskilled will likely fail. In the same way, the proper way to make trading harder is about adding skill checks to the system, not arbitrary restrictions.

The key skill in trading is item valuation, the ability to look at an item and determine its worth; the best way to make trading harder is to make item valuation harder. Adding more build diversity so that a multitude builds are considered top-tier, giving all of those builds different desires in terms of itemization, and balancing various rare affixes against each other so that the "perfect 3 prefixes" for any one build is a hotly debated subject... these are all proper means of balancing trading, making it more skill-intensive. The harder it is to determine the value of items, the better.

UI improvements for trading are a good thing, because the barrier to trading success should be difficulty in valuation, not difficulty in transaction. I say make it easy to trade, but hard to know if the trade is in your favor or not.

But what we don't need is gold — its value is far too easy to determine, and orbs are actually too close to being gold currently — and we definitely don't need a buyout system which allows the seller to be offline/busy during the actual transaction — which would cut flippers out of the economy completely.

well i don't know about you guys but D3 expansion doesn't sound that bad if it's all about the loot, because i'm sick of the action house/path of exile trading

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Dimitrii_ss2 wrote:

well i don't know about you guys but D3 expansion doesn't sound that bad if it's all about the loot, because i'm sick of the action house/path of exile trading

There´s some truth in it.

Trading is a part of APRGs online. If you want to play self found PoE/D3 then go right ahead. Just don't bitch when people have better gear than you because than can socialize and trade.

Errr, I can flip/trade AND farm at the same time. Amazing, right?