bilateralrope wrote:I've done some experimentation and found that selling lockboxes individually at 700 (lowest price per stack was 800 at the time) each sells them quicker than selling the same amount in a single stack for 400 each (when lowest price per unit was 450 before my listing).
I can see two reasons for this:
- Players not switching away from the default ordering of exchange results for whatever reason.
- Buyers being unable to buy part of a stack.
My guess is that it's mainly the first reason. No transaction fees means that buying the entire stack then relisting what you don't want is an option.
But my main conclusion is that buying a low price per unit stack and relisting the contents individually might be a good way to make EC if I could be bothered searching for the right item to flip.
You're forgetting something.
Lockboxes are totally worthless to anyone who isn't planning to open them with a key. Keys cost Zen (real money). You can buy keys with EC, as I recall, but the cost of each individual key in EC is
really big. Which is understandable, since keys cost something like 100 Zen, and 1 Zen is worth something like 400 dilithium, and 1 dilithium is worth something like 100 energy credits.
As a result, lockboxes are
pathetically cheap compared to the keys. Sure, you try to minimize what you pay for them, but it honestly does not matter if you pay 400 or 800 EC for a lockbox. Not compared to the price of the key you need to open that lockbox. Lockboxes can be easily obtained for free, after all.
So basically, when you're selling lockboxes, your target market is people who already have a key (or several keys),
know exactly how many they have, and want to buy exactly enough lockboxes to make it work. In many cases, they'll buy one key, buy one lockbox, open the lockbox. Then repeat. Because they don't want to use any more keys than necessary. Or they'll buy a fixed number of keys, then buy lockboxes one at a time, and open them. Same thing.
So there's a lot of people who honestly don't care if they get a good deal on buying your lockboxes, and will buy one or two of them at a time because
that is all they need.
...
If you try the same thing with, say, shield batteries, or R&D materials, or other things that people actually have a reason to buy in bulk... it won't work as well. That's my prediction. Plus, of course, you'd be consuming a tremendous amount of your own time and energy.
I already have decent consoles to make good science builds. I usually fire off gravity well and subspace vortex for the double whammy. However with the new temporal operative abilities I can make both of them follow enemy ships to maximise damage. My secondary deflector of course adds radiation damage to gravity well. If I get the temporal paradox dreadnought I can get an extra star ship trait to make gravity well explode and do extra damage.