UberGuy

Yep. I have a friend who basically never visits the forums who I've helped learn to use the market and the IO system in general. He doesn't really use the forums much at all, and I'm pretty sure he's never posted.

Another person around here was recently posting about his young son using the market and earning 100s of millions of inf on his own. Likely not a typical case, IMO, but I think still somewhat telling if true.

The strawman in question is appeal to the unprovable "casual player" and their implied inability to compete with hard-core marketeers. It's an easy target, and which you certainly invoked in your reference to casual folk not wanting to reference the existing history.

You may have made limited reference to it, but folks in these parts are sensitive to its use, as it is frequently found hanging from the lance tips of many a windmill-tilting poster in these parts.

Just to reinforce this... (This reply is not directed at Obitus.)

One of my older characters had been sitting near the inf cap for a while. I had been creeping back up on it from whatever time I last spent several hundred million inf on her for. I was earning inf just playing the game, mostly on defeats. I hadn't played this character in a while, so I wasn't approaching the cap very fast in terms of calendar time, but then a few weeks ago I started playing her a lot again. I was running missions on moderately high difficulty, selling my commons to NPCs, crafting uncommon recipes worth 5-10M apiece those and all my common and uncommon salvage on the market.

On November 16, 2010 I hit the inf cap. I went to the market and stored 250M inf in a bid at 6:39 PM. Right now, that character has 1,883,053,440 inf, meaning that in 7 days of play I have earned 133.1M inf. That's net - I've probably spent around 30M inf outfitting the character with new sets after a respec.

The character in question is a DM/Regen - hardly a good farmer. This character hasn't been in the AE in months, so none of this is from primate wrangling. I haven't sold any of the purple drops I've gotten, since I have a use for them all. I haven't spent the 90 Reward Merits I've earned.

Surely I must be punished for my exploits.

Just imagine what I could be doing if I was running a more AoE-centric character, and/or one at the soft-cap. Just imagine if I was selling everything now with the expectation that prices on many things will fall if I19 closes extant exploits (extraordinarily likely).

I do not weep for the salvage that costs 100k, not just because I can afford it without blinking, but because, despite that I still place patient bids. Because I keep a stash of salvage in my bins and vaults, and use that when I don't want to pay prices. 1M inf for a Nevermelting Ice? Use one of mine, put out a bid for ... 5,001. Go play for a while. Probably buy it. Didn't buy it? That's OK, I probably got one as a drop. Put that in storage to replace the one I spent. Still didn't get one? Oh, well, I'll check on that tomorrow. Oh, I need that market slot to sell something for 10M inf? Yeah, why was I worried again?

If you don't personally have characters that can do this, you need to understand that other people do, and they will happily sneeze out what you may consider stupidly high amounts of inf for things that you don't want to wait for. If you and they are both out there, they get dibs, not just in terms of buying a bid over you, but in setting the trend for the price sellers will list things at.

This is a false conclusion, based on the erroneous conclusion that "cost" is determined by what the flipper sold the item at.

As has been mentioned by other posters, the price for items on the market fluctuates. What's the "price" of something which has a sales history of something like this?

100,000
55,
101
1001
1001

Is the "price" 55? 100k? I think everyone knows it's probably none of those. Most likely it's somewhere in between the extremes. When people here say flippers don't raise the price, that middle-ground price is the price they're talking about.

A flipper does raise the price floor at which a patient buyer can buy things, because you have to outbid the flipper. But if we're talking about truly patient buyers here, they have two patient approaches. One is to try to "out-patient" the flipper - you can bid less than the flipper's price floor and try to wait out their bidding. The other is to use the price history to glean the bidder's price floor and bid that +1 inf. By definition, if you're trying to get a bargain by being patient, you are willing to wait. The flipper may force you to move your chosen time vs. price target.

Note that the above assumes a product that's actually operating around the price that the market will bear. If that's not the case, any seller can move the price upwards. This happens with new IOs whose true market value hasn't been realized, and it can also happen when there is an increase in supply of Inf in the system (like, oh, now).

How does this work? It's pretty simple. The price history tends to make prices "sticky". People see the price history and a lot of them tend to both sell and bid near the history. However, there may be people willing to pay much more than the price history indicates, but who don't have to pay as much as they're willing to because the price is "stuck" lower. But if supply becomes low, these people will start bidding higher, moving towards their personal "cap" on what they are willing to pay. If they actually manage to buy the product, this higher sale price will appear in the history, and the race is on. The essence of this has been captured in the past by folks observing that the price on anything with zero for sale can probably be raised. The observation is that if there are none for sale, someone probably is bidding (or will bid in the future) more than any bid presently in the history. There was a whole thread about people testing the theory and finding it held up very well.

So if you come into this situation and manage to buy one of the few items that drops, you can almost certainly resell it for higher than you bought it for. If you set about doing this consistently, you're probably raising both the price floor and the price ceiling, and thus the "true" price.

Now, arguably, someone "flipping" prices higher in a situation like this isn't a "flipper" in the sense the term is usually used around here. A "true" flipper tries to keep their list price just under most everyone else's to make sure they get the sale. The activity I'm describing requires one to list intentionally above other sellers prices in an effort to get as much profit per sale as possible, instead of getting the most sales per unit time.

It's worth pointing out, though, that you don't have to flip stuff in this environment to make the price go up. If someone comes along with one of these widgets they got the hard way and lists at an ambitious price, that too can "un-stick" the price. As with more "traditional" flipping, putting a flipper in the picture drives the market price towards an item's "true" market value faster.

Hilarious and agreed.

EoEs in particular are probably a bad choice. Servers with strong raiding communities need very few of them. Servers without such communities need lots of them, and this shifts the onus to the attendees to bring their own. But n00b and leechy raiders wouldn't do this, which shifts a heavy cost to responsible leaders and attendees who try to supply them. That sounds like a pressure against forming Hami raids that servers who don't raid regularly probably don't need.

Well, I think letting someone use Inf essentially creates that tradable merits no matter what. Even if I can't create merits on multiple characters in the same day, I can still send money from my rich ones to others and use that to create merits they wouldn't otherwise have. I can also use market monies to "earn" merits.

That said, your example of mailing inf to alts definitely breaks the proposal I gave in response to Fulmens using diminishing returns. One character has to spend 16M to get 42 Merits in a day, where four distinct characters could get 80 total merits for 4M apiece or 16M total. So yeah, if they want to limit per-player rates of item creation, they couldn't implement at least that kind of scheme without limiting purchases account-wide.

Yeah, I was thinking about that yesterday and forgot about it by the time I posted tonight. Putting in some sort of per/day purchase limit probably solves the problem I described above.

Of course, at that point it's probably easier to map Inf purchases to Alignment Merits, since they already have an easy-to-compare purchase rate limit mechanism in place. Given current A-Merit prices though (20M Inf + 50 Reward Merits), and using a rough conversion rate of one A-Merit is worth around 100 R-Merits (very rough), then we've got 100 R-Merits = 20M Inf + 50 R-Merits, or one R-Merit is worth 400,000 inf. So if they let us buy around 100 R-Merits a day at price of 40M inf, that would be roughly equitable. (Edit: For access to purples and PvPOs, people might prefer or at least like in addition the ability to buy 1 A-Merit a day with Inf. My rough 40M is probably too cheap for that, though, since that makes 35 A-Merit PvPOs cost around 1.4B Inf.)

If they want to use diminishing returns they could let us buy R-Merits like 20 at a time (worth 8M Inf by my scribbling above), but start at a lower per-purchase price (4M Inf?) subject the purchase to diminishing returns like it's a TF.

That would look like this, for purchases made within 18 (20?) hours of one another.

20 Merits = 4M Inf
30 Merits = 8M Inf
37 Merits = 12M Inf
42 Merits = 16M Inf
46 Merits = 20M Inf
49 Merits = 24M Inf
52 Merits = 28M Inf

Obviously, one could play with this by fiddling with the initial value and the per-purchase cost. I chose 20 Merits because that's one random roll, and I mostly picked 200k Inf/Merit out of thin air.

I don't know if they'd limit it by account, since no other merit stuff is. But if they were looking to be particularly draconian, just to be safe, I suppose it makes some sense. You can't create Inf on multiple accounts at the same time, but I do suppose you can collect it on multiple characters simultaneously, using the market. Of course, that case becomes a pretty good inf sink.

I'm going out on a limb and guessing this has to do with whatever they use as their release management sytem. They'd need to create a branch release based on the current live code with the correction in place. They'd have to QC that branch to make sure they didn't accidentally load something they weren't supposed to (probably something from either I19 or even something further down the pike). Then they'd have to get it in the NCSoft deployment pipeline in front of I19 - this used to be a big pain when Cryptic was doing the coding, but maybe it's easier now that they're a subsidiary.

And all that assumes there's no resource bottleneck. In reality they might have to delay I19 if they did all that.

Release management for complex software systems is a pain. I need to get up at 3 AM to help deploy a release on a Sunday morning, so I have some experience with this. (I have no idea what tools or processes PS uses, however. I'm offering what seems to me like a reasonable hypothetical explanation for why they haven't addressed it ahead of I19. I fully expect it to be addressed when I19 lands.)

Well, let's look at this Reward Merit rates we know of today. The only reference I know of is still recorded on ParagonWiki here. It lists the target rate of minutes per Merit produced during merit-producing activity as 3.7. The devs apply a bunch of fudge factors to modify how many merits/minute specific tasks are actually worth. I'm sure we could have lively, many-party debate about how valid those fudge factors are, but at least we have a base target rate number to work with.

Some of the top end farming numbers I've seen are 30 million inf/hour. I'm pretty sure those numbers were from before the devs doubled the inf reward rate that 50s get, but lets stick with the 30 number, since I doubt everyone who farms is "top-end". (As a point of reference, my more tricked out level 50 characters can earn from 5-10M inf/hour running things like paper and scanner missions, with that range depending primarily on how high I can set their team size and have them survive.)

So using that 30M inf/hour number, we get 500k inf/minute. At a target rate of 3.7 minute/merit, that works out to 1.85M inf/merit.

At a merit purchase rate of 1.5k inf/merit, we'd have a rough equivalent of 333.3 merits per minute. I'm going to guess exceeding the Dev's stated target by a factor of 90 or so is probably too gracious. That sounds to me like it would radically flood the system with non-purple, non-PvPO stuff.

Enyalios' number of 2M inf/merit is a lot close to my guestimate, and works out to an equivalent of 4 minutes per merit - a lot more like the Dev's target number.

My guess, though, is that they would hedge even higher, because elapsed time isn't the only constraint on Reward Merit production. There's also something of a barrier to entry, at least for stuff with the best peak Reward Merit rates, which are TF/SFs and trials. Not everyone has access to a team that can form up fast or run anything like the best completion times, so not everyone is churning out fast Reward Merits. I'm thinking that's why there's such a firm time constraint on Alignment Merits - they're the "common man's" substitute for Reward Merits in the sense that they really don't have any more strings attached than regular missions and arcs do. (Edit: Well, they do have to own GR and stay hero or villain. I don't know what that does to production rates.) Thus I'm betting way more people can produce them , and so (my thinking goes) the Devs put more firm limits on how fast any character can produce them.

So since anyone (at least anyone with a 50) can produce boatloads of inf with no comparable rate limits, I'm betting the devs would fudge any inf->merit conversion rates upwards from the ~1.85M inf/merit I got above. I have no idea what fudge factor they'd use, but I'm thinking at least a factor of 2.5 or so. So using that and the 1.85M inf/merit number, get 4.625M inf/merit. I'll fudge down to something "round" and call that 4.5M inf/merit, which would be 9 minutes per merit.

Whether that's high or low from what they might do is probably most heavily dependent on the number used as the estimate on inf farming rates. I have the sense that they would hedge high on this number to mitigate the impact of things like AE exploits.

The transaction sink removes inf from the game system (not just the market). But people playing the game, primarily in the form of defeating mobs, adds inf to the system. If the rate of adding inf to the system exceeds that by which the market removes inf from the system, the amount of inf people will have access to will increase. Now, probably key to your point, if we assume some fixed rate of inf creation, you're right, eventually it we should reach a point where the size and rate of market transactions rise to level that removing 10% of each one will match the inf production rate. However, I think there is probably significant lag here. For any given change in inf production rates, there is a delay in how that really disseminates through the larger market, and thus a delay in how fast market fees eat into the new supply level. I would also expect some oscillation, because this is a feedback system. Combine that with general behavioral "noise" in our market's prices and the trend is probably extremely hard to see.

Here's the tricky part - inf supply rates is not the only factor we see on market prices. Not only is the amount of inf in the system important, but its ratio to the amount of stuff for sale. I have the feeling that the AE and its fairly regular litany of exploits is a source of a lot of instability here, because newly found exploits not only introduce big changes in the inf supply rate (sometimes it's probably looked like a step change), it does so in a way that almost certainly doesn't come with proportional increases in other goods. "Traditional" farms produce inf and drops in more coupled proportions, though the relationship can still be complex because drop rates aren't a function of foe level, but inf rates are.

It's all a matter of perspective and definition. As implemented, it's as though turning off XP means you're doing stuff where you don't learn anything new, but patrol XP means that because of stuff you character did when you were offline, they learn new things faster, when there's something new to learn.

I'm not defending it or anything. I just don't think it's abundantly clear that the toggle for not earning XP should/has to mean that you can't (somehow) improve how fast you earn XP when you earning start again.

In the interest of disclosure, I want Patrol XP to work as it does now. I turn off XP only to prevent myself from outleveling content. That means I only disable it at the threshold of every fifth level, when necessary. When I turn it back on, I am happy to speed faster to the next 5-level threshold, since it gets me five more levels of power picks and slots.

It is not true. I have characters who I have logged out with XP turned off, and they have new patrol XP (blue "bubs") on their XP progress circle when I log them back in.

Looks that way. Which for me is pure, 100% win, because I typically only two-slot Stamina with EndMod these days, placing the Performance Shifter proc in the third slot and only occasionally going to four total slots. (In three slot cases I slot a common End Mod, a Perf Shifter End Mod and a Perf Shifter proc. In Four slots I use four pieces of Perf Shifter, and I'll still get more net +recovery out of using this Alpha line.)

Edit: Sadly, most of my builds are going to benefit more overall from Spiritual or Cardiac lines more than this.

You can't. All you can do is shut off XP in total.

This isn't the suggestions forum. You should post your suggestions in that forum. This is the questions forum. To the question of "how do I shut off Patrol XP?" the only answer is "you can't, but you can turn of XP, period".

Yeah... that doesn't do anything. You still get patrol XP doing that.

It's not supposed to have a limited duration in a click power. It's supposed to be on full time, no matter where you slot it. However, I've read in a couple of other recent threads that someone has tested its duration at around 10s. This would be nearly completely pointless.

If it's really working this way, because of how incredibly limited it would be and because it is inconsistent with both how this worked previously and how other similar IOs work, I believe it is a bug.

2/3 of 45% is 30%, so I think it's as simple as it lowering the global recharge needed by 30%. (I'm assuming you retain 3 recharge slots in it, and that the 15% of the Alpha Boost that is affected by ED doesn't meaningfully move the slotted value. I didn't check that, though.)