Flight Rising Discussion

so. im a long time on and off again player. and i have no data to back up this assertion. but i feel like it used to be easier to get random non-valuable apparel from the AH. i'm currently making a fandragon and like a quarter of the apparel i need, even if they're just middle-of-the-road treasure MP items, are either available only for gems at substantial markup or just not available at all. am i hitting a random lull in AH listings? i feel like this has been happening a lot with making my other fandragons in the last few years.

and as for why, i would guess that the proliferation of apparel, while VERY MUCH APPRECIATED, makes it harder for people to do hoard cleanouts of apparel on the AH [looks at 50 pages of apparel in hoard] so. supply and demand problem.

Prices fluctuate, but overall I'd say the LAH for apparel has dropped significantly. However, it could be that because there's more treasure apparel overall, it may be harder (or impossible) for treasure resellers to keep everything in stock in great quantities, leading to more "shortages."

I also don't know how many general "small-markup" resellers there are at any given time. I only know of a few I'd have recognized by name over the years as people who broadly stocked treasure apparel at a reasonable markup, and if they're currently on hiatus or something or just don't have time to engage with that playstyle anymore, I'm not sure it's a market most people consider worth investing in.

So… really I think it depends on what you want and how fast you want it, in terms of finding stuff on the AH. I haven't had much trouble with most of the items I've bought recently, and, again, I think fodder apparel price is down from what it was years ago, but prices fluctuate and more items does mean it's harder to stay in stock at reasonable prices.

The problem with apparel is that there's so much of it that people find it difficult to research what is selling enough to be profitable. That means either trying to stock as much as possible with only a couple in reserve or only stocking a few items that are likely to be in demand. Both ways require a ton of AH searches. There's also the effect of flash sales which can permanently drop the prices on items. I'm looking at you, red rose flowerfall.

With over 2,200 MP items that's just ridiculous for the first so what happens is people don't buy MP items to relist. Instead, they list drops out of chests or site activities (coliseum, Arlo, etc.). That leads to a fairly random assortment of apparel without a lot of comparison prices or fodder apparel. With no comparison prices sellers aim high and then lower them gradually until they sell or they get tired of relisting.

There's also the cheap Baldwin fodder. With all that apparel in people's hoards I see a bunch of people who just drop everything at fodder prices so that discourages sellers from bothering.

There's 180 items in the MP right now. You might consider using the MP's search function (magnifying lens in a box) to search for the items you want.

Whenever I've dabbled with reselling MP apparel in the past, it doesn't sell consistently enough at a high enough markup to be worth the bother of keeping up with it. I'm sure there are some items for which this is not the case, but finding out which items those are requires either sinking a bunch of treasure into trial-and-erroring which items will actually move or keeping an eye on the listings of hundreds and hundreds of items. Neither is particularly fun. Even once you'd found a few items that are worth stocking, you then have to wait around forever for the MP to actually stock them in order to buy to relist.

And genuinely? If I'm going to go through all that effort, it's darn well going to be in gems.

Selling extra items for gems is one of the easier (if long-term) ways to make gems for people who don't spend irl currency on the site, too, so items are not listed for treasure as often.

Each piece is usually sold pretty close to the treasure marketplace price, but only so many of those items are added to the AH every day. Even if an item is available only for a gem markup, it's still usually pretty easy to get by camping at the treasure marketplace.

All this to say, there just aren't very many AH listings for everything, so the prices often look much higher than what the item's worth.

I haven't felt this way, personally. I have no data, but I often check AH for treasure MP apparel, and most of the time I find it pretty cheap (just a slight markup from treasure MP price).

ofc sometimes it's a substantial markup (no, I am not paying 30g for tea cups) but that's uncommon and I don't feel like it's been getting worse.

This discussion is fascinating! Back in the day I used to make most of my money by sniping in demand apparel from the MP and reselling on AH. But now that I'm back from hiatus, a lot of the items that used to be high-ticket aren't moving at all, and I haven't quite been able to figure out what apparel is more in demand. I guess it makes sense that since there's sooo much apparel now, the culture has shifted.

[quote name="Nightwind" date="2025-03-19 11:31:01" ] With over 2,200 MP items that's just ridiculous for the first so what happens is people don't buy MP items to relist.[/quote] [quote name="Nightwind" date="2025-03-19 11:31:01" ] There's 180 items in the MP right now. [/quote] this is the root of it. there are over 2,000 items that [i]could[/i] stock in the marketplace, but at any given moment very few of them do. because of the relatively low odds that an item will stock, when i want an item of apparel, i buy it from the AH. i am [i]not[/i] wasting my time refreshing the marketplace every five minutes for an unknown period of time on the chance that the item i want will stock. it could be days before it does. chances are, i'll be offline when it finally stocks! i refuse to waste my time refreshing a page. that's not fun. i've been creating a lot of deliberate outfits in the dressing room lately, making use of the item database to find the best apparel for the look i want. this has given me an unexpected insight into AH apparel prices for certain items. namely, that the most [i]random[/i] items, often the not-that-popular ones, are stupidly expensive for a month or two, and then dirt-cheap for a month or two, and so on. sometimes a single item costs significantly more on the AH than the entire [i]bundle[/i] for that item. a few times, i've found that one item costs double its bundle, which itself is obscenely overpriced. quite often there's exactly one listing for the item, and exactly one for the bundle too, by entirely different players. it's completely random which items will be expensive, and when. a couple of months ago, classy spats were through the roof. now the cheapest is going for about 10g, but there are still only four listings total. it's not [i]only[/i] marketplace items, but they are the worst offenders. for about a month, i controlled the market for [url=https://www1.flightrising.com/game-database/item/47021]dour sailor's pants[/url]. this was not deliberate control: i was simply the only player on site selling this item. i could name almost any price and someone would pay it within the day. it was ridiculous and i began to raise and raise my price as an experiment. i had started at 90g. when i hit 300, new sellers appeared. the price is still high for the item in question, but more reasonable. why do i have so many dour sailor's pants? i saw them as ideal for some fandragons i wanted to make and wanted to ensure i had a good supply. i didn't expect their price to skyrocket. i thought they'd be broadly undesirable, in fact. i was clearly wrong about that. i've thought for a long time that the apparel marketplace needs to change in some way, perhaps to stock more at a time, or to stock for longer periods, or to have stock wipes only at rollover and not at all the rest of the day... [i]something[/i] to make any given marketplace apparel item more available. but that's only part of the problem. players who have an excess of an item may not think to sell it, because in their mind it couldn't possibly be worth it. it's a random cheap fodder item, there's probably fifty pages of them on the AH for 2g. it's not worth the time or the trouble to manually search the AH for every apparel item you happen have a few spares of to see if that's true, because most players have [i]hundreds[/i] of unique apparel types they could sell spares of if they knew they were currently so scarce on the AH. in short, i percieve three inter-connected problems: 1) it takes a lot of time doing something deeply uninteresting and repetitive (refreshing the page) to buy a specific item in the marketplace. 2) it takes a lot of time doing something deeply uninteresting and repetitive (searching them all on the AH) to find out which apparel you have spares of are worth selling right now. 3) it takes a lot of time doing something deeply uninteresting and repetitive (relisting expired auctions) to [i]keep[/i] them on the AH for more than a week. so selling apparel is a deeply un-fun, reptitive, and time-consuming task.