There are other ways to get salvage other than influence.
The market fills a void for people who do not want to use their merits or AE tickets to get salvage,
There is no need for changes to the market... the market works exactly how it should. The only reason that salvage is so high (at times) is because there is a shortage of supply and people are willing to pay more due to that shortage). Prices on salvage fluctuate from one extreme to the other...most people who have a problem with the price are "Gots to have it now" people. You don't want to get burned on the market house....plan ahead and put your low bids in before you "need" the item. You will be amazed at what a little patience will save you influence wise....
I don't believe this is exactly accurate. There were definitely players who moved to corner the market on select pieces of salvage and did so with regularity. The shortage of supply was sort of true, but when I could see there were 5,000 pieces of a particular item out there and they all cost 100,000 inf to buy (and the day before you could pick them up for 20 inf) then someone has just cornered the market for that item.
This happened partially because of similarities in IOs. For instance, all the Defensive IOs required a particular piece of salvage.
Yes, you can wait it out to buy that one piece of salvage but if the marketeers are currently still bidding this can take a while (a week or so in some instances).
Sometimes the marketeers produced a bidding war that lowered the prices some and even gave good opportunity to make some cheap inf yourself.
Yes, you could go and farm AE for tickets but this isn't as easy to do for some chars. Many of the sets out there are weak for farming and have to resort to just doing those as missions. Still way faster than waiting a week, but it does start to feel more like grinding than playing. Particularly for those with a limited time they can allot to game play.
I don't know if the problem was exactly the marketeers though as some pieces of salvage were used in many of the choice IOs and so it was easy to concentrate on those items.
Personally, I think the problem started simply because for quite a while there were many fewer options on how to spend inf during the early stages of the game. By the time that IOs and the market came into being we had quite a few players who had already obtained huge amounts of inf (not just fire/kins). They could corner the market if they wanted to or pay any amount for that piece of salvage.
This when compared to the average player and you can see where the complaints start to come in.
The solution for the market would have been for bid daddy guv'ment to step in and make selling of those items to be more limited. Basically, my thought would have been a limit of say 500 pieces of any single piece of salvage for any single player. The whole laissez faire approach was too simple for my taste.
The other solution was to change either the drop rate for those kinds of salvage (increasing them) or to change the recipes to allow for more variance.
Helpful overall would have been to increase the amount of salvage we could carry ourselves. I would have loved to see an option for that introduced into the game.
Thus endith my dissertation on CoH economics.
