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I’ve been stocking up to make bank during NOTN and if anyone remembers, I’d love a vague gauge of the market then. Were prices higher towards the beginning or the end? Did they rise really noticeably (ex 1g transmutes to 3, 20 to 25) or only a bit above normal? Anything you may remember or think is useful, I’d love to know.

@Ellapinky

This goes for every new Baldwin release or gene/breed release and festival.

Prices are always highest during the beginning. Generally they rise over the first few hours as people figure out what's needed and what they want to brew and usually reach a peak sometime during the first 24 hours and then fall off over the next 48 hours before they stabilize. Prices generally do a small recovery a quarter of the way through the event as people run out of supplies and then trend downward as people finish brewing all they want. There's normally not an uptick at the end but sales will come faster at the low end.

Prices for transmutes generally doubled with black/white slime going up the most. Some colors never budged if you bought in bulk/sold in bulk.

The reason prices aren't going as nuts as the first year is that despite the larger amount of recipes to brew there's been a ton of helpful posts about transmuting with Baldwin to make money and when to sell. Case in point is festival currency which generally sells at 1g each for a few hours the first day and can be found in Items for Sale 2/1g by Tuesday and 3/1g by the last day if not sooner.

I'd suggest looking in the AH now for all the NotN specific recipe results and seeing how much they're selling for to determine demand and what transmutes are needed for them if your plan is to sell transmutes. Buying up cheap transmutes now (ideally a few weeks ago) for those items to sell the first day is generally profitable.

The market will continue to evolve as players respond to the various changes (new items, more guides, more posts) so eventually looking at past recs won't help or at least won't help as much. The trick is determining how people will respond to figure out the next profitable thing.

After all, eventually all the NotN items will go up in price as the amount of recipes increases and there's no longer enough time to make everything. We're getting close to it now as people concentrate on brewing Strange Chests since egg prices have gone through the roof.

Good luck!

@Nightwind

Yo, first off thank you for the log response, all of that is exactly what I’m looking for. Thank you! :D

Less so buying cheap transmutes to flip (didn’t remember that one soon enough, so it’s on the books for next year instead) as hiring transmuters and stocking up mucks to sell. I’ll have to get to slimes once I finish my current stash of familiars, but since the fodder apparel market is a little more expensive I’ve been melting...so many pages of familiars. Sorry, Psywurms.

Currently have an eye on the ingredients for Strange Chests (ditto on the egg thing - how much do you think they’ll fall? Really hoping for maybe 30% (230ishg) but with the new egg market I feel like that’s unfeasible) and the Eerie Cyan set since prices for Cyan have been pretty great (particularly the jewels/rings). Then again, whatever new apparel comes out this year could be an unexpected upset, so gotta have some of everything, you know?

Plan at the moment is to throw what I’ve got spare on the market about ten-ish hours in (maybe sooner) since a lot of the US player base will be up and at it around then. When you said prices generally doubled, did you mean post-stabilization of prices? That would make sense, but I wanted to check.

Again, thank you for the long response! I really appreciate it :D

@Ellapinky

Glad to help! I've been pushing Baldwin advice here since he came out so I've got a lot of stuff for him.

There's been a big push towards stocking up on eggs. Not just in Help but it's been popping up in discussion every few weeks when people go nutsy over finding/trying to buy eggs. I'm guessing 200-250k but I've been wrong before. That being said I'm grabbing anything under 200k.

Fodder apparel hasn't gotten below 3g in forever. I've been sniping the occasional cheap apparel but the coli and offsite trading is supplying my day to day needs and cabbie bundles bought during dom weeks are my backup supply if fodder apparel rises past 5g/6k or so. In that case I'll start selling fodder apparel.

Prices generally double during the first rise but the post-stabilization is anyone's guess. Depending on how many players have been hoarding and how fast things sell prices could stabilize at double. Prices would stabilize higher if people wouldn't get impatient. I'd rather take 1.8 for a full 2 weeks instead of 4x the first hour and then 1.1 for the rest of NotN.

I'm still anticipating that future NotN recipes will call for ever-increasing amounts of materials to draw off more of the supply. The admins have been balancing Baldwin forever but the rate is very slow for whatever reason. It's an amazing treasure sink so they might not be willing to upset the balance too much at a time in case that stops.

@Nightwind

Good to know on the fodder apparel thing, I haven’t kept good track of it for a bit and I keep realizing I’ve been on this site longer than it feels like I have (oops)

On the egg thing, best I can guess is I’ll have to wait about 2/3 of the way through and see where egg prices land, and guess if it’ll drop right after as people try to unload them too fast, all depending on the percent drop during NOTN itself. Either way, with the new eyes eggs will just keep going up unless they pull a Galore’s Eliminates on us with them (which would only hold for so long, even if it’s a couple years, since they’re consumables) so either way it would still hopefully go alright.

For the mats, prisoner’s dilemma kicks in - sell during that first stretch and contribute to the price drop problem, or hold and miss out on good profit if everyone else drops theirs? I’d love the price floor to hold more stable, but I’m not so sure compared to losing the profit window if things pan out badly. Prisoner’s dilemma says it’s always better to help and thus hold, but the other party knows what’s up there and it’s not the same here with economics.

Also, with the price of red goo for the reinforced beakers, the yellow-copper chest x1 is looking a lot better than the red/silver/gold unless the goal is as many chests as inhumanly possible (which mine is not) so hey, great time to have a stash of some of the least expensive transmutes, right?

@Ellapinky

I'm generally of the wait and hold. I don't count on Baldwin as my main income so making out big every time isn't essential. Also, it means more supplies for the next new thing when it comes out and everyone else is still out of whatever it is.

The thing with Eliminate is that you can get by with one, three is ideal and everything after that is just for fun. Hatching eggs...I could clear out my exalts and have room to hatch a few hundred.

I'm expecting at some point that either the admins will decide we can have more chests or else we've got too many chests and the recipes will stay as they are. If they do decide we can have more I'd expect a pair of new recipes; one that creates some sort of container and one that uses that container plus transmutes to make more chests.

@Nightwind

Fair enough with the wait-and-hold. I’m holding the profit of my AH listings there until NOTN so I don’t impulse spend, so I’m back to exalting way more frequently since I can’t collect on plain flipped fodder right now. Chances are I’ll do some sort of half-half while I see how the market shifts (hopefully higher than the normal semi-crash)

The new chest brew is definitely interesting, and it does sound like something that would happen in a couple NOTNs from now. Even so, the yellowcopper is like what, 12g ish minus mimic powder to craft by LAH right now? Redsilvergold is something like 35-40g. Maybe I’ll spend that first day grinding harder to make up for the less chests I brew.

@Ellapinky

No dom battles=cheap adults. I don't think there's anything on the horizon until next year.

If you're keeping track you might try flipping chests/materials. Grinding is going to be fun. Info on previous years here for the Swipp materials. I should probably start excavating them from my vault to ready them for sale.

@nightwind

Definitely going to be profiting on chests and buying whatever it is I wanted afterwards. I’m torn a lot between grinding and leveling fodder during NOTN - since dom battles are going it’ll definitely be a good time to unload a full hibden, but I’m assuming grinding is more profitable overall because fodder prices will go way up?

Sigh. Gotta re-level a team, I cleared a purge semi-recently and I’m only halfway on my new crew (who are both specific fodder builds instead of a Culex grinder, but in the lower venues it doesn’t matter with how fast they die anyway)