UberGuy

One was a post about bread in the Soviet Union. The other was about Cuba. The thread isn't that long. Surely you can find them.

OK, before we discuss the actual suggestion, that's not a "price cap". A "price cap" is where you declare by fiat that no one is allowed to sell a good over a given price. What you're describing is nothing like that. It's simple competition. Sellers on the market would be competing with a fixed price store.

Now, let's actually talk about the suggestion about introducing a fixed price store. Guess what? They exist! There are two - the Reward Merit, Alignment Merit and (in a more limited way) AE Ticket vendors all offer fixed-price goods.

But of course, those aren't exactly what you suggested, are they? You want a fixed price store (essentially) that' lets people buy things with inf. Have you given any thought to why the devs might not do that? Lets consider a couple of possibilities.

• Inf is comparatively easy to create. Top-end farmers have reported rates as high as around 30M inf/hour, and that's not counting any serious, wildly unintended rewards exploits, like when Masterminds were mowing down mass spawns of Archvillains with their pets.
• Inf is transferable. As a result, you you can pool it from other characters. As a result of that, you can buy inf from other people.

Inf is the easiest basic reward we can acquire in this game outside of XP and prestige - not shocking, since the reward mechanisms for the three are tightly coupled. Allowing people to use inf to directly create new items would enable the playerbase to wildly proliferate those items. I hate to break this to you, but the devs want it to take a while to get things.

You know what other thing is really easy to create? AE tickets. Sure, there are some additional restrictions around them that Inf doesn't share. For example, you can't trade them. Notice anything else you can't do with them? You can't buy the good stuff outright using them. Except for rare salvage, you can only get random invention components. That's more evidence that the devs don't want us to be able to use easily obtainable materials to produce specific goods.

Why wouldn't the devs want us to do that? Why only allow us to buy explicit drops with Reward and Alignment Merits? The implication is because they're more limited. Reward Merits, at least in theory, are supposed to be obtainable at certain rates. If a given piece of content has a median completion time to complete, it will produce Y Reward Merits. The ratio of Y/X is supposed to be fixed for all content of the same category. Alignment Merits have a firmly fixed reward rate - 1 merit per two days, or 3 merits per two days if you additionally burn 40M inf and 100 Reward Merits.

The devs place an extremely high time premium on our being able to obtain specific rewards. Inf is too easy. They want it to take us longer to obtain stuff on average, so all the store-like mechanisms use alternative currencies that are much better-controlled proxies for elapsed time.

No, you're being flamed and called ignorant because you won't even consider the possibility that you're wrong about what's going on. Is there market manipulation? Sure as hell there is. It is not happening where you claim it is. Honestly, if all you had claimed was that there was manipulation, I might not even have posted in this thread. Instead, you claimed very specifically that the most expensive items are being manipulated, and there's just too much evidence to support that specific claim being wrong. Evidence like the fact that people pay more than 2B inf outside the market interface. Evidence like the fact that the price/AMerit ratio of an LotG:Recharge suggests that a GA:3% should cost around 2.6B inf.

And even if you were right, the devs wouldn't give us an inf-based store for this stuff, because letting this stuff be hard to get is in their best interests.

I was going to post this in my other reply to him and didn't, but this was too nice of a segue.

From Wikipedia.

Prima facie (pronounced /ˈpriːmə ˈfæsiːa/, from Latin prīmā faciē) is a Latin expression meaning on its first appearance, or at first sight. The literal translation would be "at first face", prima first, facie face, both in the ablative case. It is used in modern legal English to signify that on first examination, a matter appears to be self-evident from the facts. In common law jurisdictions, prima facie denotes evidence which – unless rebutted – would be sufficient to prove a particular proposition or fact.

In most legal proceedings, one party has a burden of proof, which requires it to present prima facie evidence for all of the essential facts in its case. If they cannot, its claim may be dismissed without any need for a response by other parties. A prima facie case might not stand or fall on its own; if an opposing party introduces other evidence or asserts an affirmative defense it can only be reconciled with a full trial. Sometimes the introduction of prima facie evidence is informally called making a case or building a case.

B_C is trying to claim that the behavior of these high priced items is obviously evidence of manipulation, presumably because no one sane would willingly pay these prices. Prima facie, since the prices are preposterous, they must only exist because someone is manipulating the situation.

Unfortunately for B_C, there have been multiple rebuttals. There is other evidence, which other posters have presented, which indicate that the self-evident nature of his claim are untrue. They have included the market theories of supply and demand; historical, real-world behavior of the prices of goods with price caps set below market prices, and in-game information about off-market sales of goods with apparent "market" prices above the in-game market's price ceiling. The implied supporting position that prices so high are preposterous has been brought into question.

A prima facie case can survive when rebutted, but doing so requires either additional supporting facts, or further explanation about how the facts already presented show the case. In my view, B_C has done neither.

Depending on which side you were on, that may have lowered prices.

But almost certainly not from the perspective of the OP's last view of the market.

I hope you posted this while looking in the mirror.

In case you don't get it, you just did exactly what you're accusing everyone else of: making a claim while not only failing to defend it, including an attack on those on the other side of the argument. Don't think anyone missed the comparison between marketeers and petty criminals.

No one on an internet forum can prove they have any knowledge without posting it for others to see. You have no more validity than anyone on this forum with your claims, and you have done less than others in trying to post knowledge that indicates what you're claiming is true. A lot of what you've tried to post about how you think the market works mechanically, let alone as a complex system of interactions using those mechanisms, is factually in error.

Demand for the items on the market that sell for 2B inf is such that people routinely sell them off-market for more than that. The PvP +3% defense unique sells for at least 3B inf off-market. It's absolutely impossible that anyone is forcing people to pay 3B inf or more for something in a face-to-face trade when it can be bought on the market for 2B inf.

This is your evidence for what market price caps do. There is a long line of people offering to pay 2B inf for PvP +3%. I know, because I have been one of them. I have left bids for 2B inf that did not fill for five weeks, despite the fact that about one +3% def IO sold per day.

Do you know what I did? I eventually got tired of waiting and paid for it off-market.

Now try to imagine the length of the lines if the price was capped at 250M inf.

That bug/oversight was hilarious. I self-powerleveled my Inv/EM tank like 5 levels in the back end of Crey's Folly using that. It was an awesome mix of elation at the raw destruction and huge rewards, plus a sense of feeling dirty because it was so obviously not intended.

And yeah, I killed myself with it plenty while I was at it.

Ah, yeah, I knew this. No idea why it didn't occur to me to include it in my example. I'm going to chalk it up to writing it at the hour I did.

I really, really like the new FE.

I'm happy to let this go, but I still disagree. I don't accept that turn of phrase. I maintain it is wrong of you to say what you are saying - a point I understand and don't fundamentally disagree with - in that way.

I think it's better. It's not how I'd say it. I suspect you'd think how I'd say it to be saying the same thing with more words, or only conditionally.

A response to one bullet of nitpickery...

All I was arguing was that I didn't think it was desirable to give whatever players might do that more reason to think that way. I didn't intend to suggest that I think, for example, a majority of people think that way. The market has positive feedback built into it with respect to participation - the more there is, the more people are prone to use it, and vice versa. Anything that adds or removes players from the pool can have a magnified effect, especially if market participation is already near an inflection point. Thus I prefer to err broadly on the side of encouraging participation. I do not prefer to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though, and things like this topic involve a fine line between the two somewhere along the way.

I'm going to answer some of this out of order, because some of my responses are very nitpicky and would just obscure my main points. The nitpicky stuff is at the bottom.

You have a very different understanding of the phrase "no material influence" than I do. I consider the factual claim you're making to be false. Just because the performance difference is arguably unnecessary does not mean it is negligible. See below for why, but the only thing I can take from your position is that because the benefits of purples (applied intelligently) are already far more than anyone actually needs to play the game, their benefit doesn't matter. And if that's what you mean, it's quite simply untrue. There are characters I have whose ability to play sustainably on the difficulties I set them is absolutely dependent on bonuses that I get from adding purples to in to the other stuff they have.

I makes me wonder if there's something you may not be considering in all of this, though I'm pretty sure you must be aware of it on some level. It's perhaps somewhat tangential to the discussion of extreme builds versus casual builds, but I think it's at least somewhat relevant. That something is this: In CoH, a lot of high end survival or victory criteria, when modeled mathematically using averages, involve terms in the form of 1/X. As you make build changes that cause X to approach zero, the metric in question increases non-linearly. If you happen to already have X small and you can buy yourself a small incremental boost that edges X closer to zero, you can gain significant performance benefits. The general forum community has some decent awareness of this effect for defense and resistance buffs (as defense or DR approach 100% avoidance/resistance, admitted average damage approaches 0). But it applies as well to Endurance sustatinability, and HP recovery rates (either healing or regen) as well.

Because purples give fairly large boosts to recharge and sometimes recovery, they can give meaningful increases even on "diminishing" benefits like recharge. Because they're expensive you add them last if ever, but when you add them they do move the attribute noticeably on a percentage basis. This is probably pointless improvement on small base values (4 sec recharge), but possibly very valuable on high base values (60+ sec recharge). If the powers affected can then benefit one of the 1/X factors in your performance, that percentage increase can buy you significant improvements.

I doubt this level of balance was explicitly intended by the devs, but having to pay increasingly large amounts (and thus take more time) to get small linear improvments that lead to asymptotic improvements actually works out pretty well, broadly speaking. The exact values involved probably are out of whack with an intentional effort to balance such a design, but the idea works out nicely, IMO.

The point is that those performance gains can be real and significant, and that can make people find them desirable. I think people idolize them more than they should, but I don't think we can make the claim that they're ignorable.

It sounds like you're arguing about a different demographic of the game's playerbase than I am. You're taking the position of players who want more but not everything. I've never claimed that those players aren't better off now. I actually said fairly clearly that they are. The people who aren't better off are the ones who actually do want "everything", are willing to work for it, but now need to marketeer to get there at the rate they were before via other means. (The "willing to work for it part is key" - I don't much give a damn what befalls people who just want it all nao without doing something.)

You did not word what I responded to in the previous post in this way. If you are saying you're clarifying your position, I have no problem with that, but I want to be clear about what I responded to, because it is most certainly not the same thing you said here.

You prevoously said:

"Any" is a very strong word. You didn't say "non-purple stuff is the most materially relevant". You said, in effect, that purples have no relevance at all on practical performance. That's what I objected to. In my opinion, the facts don't even support that assertion with the qualification "practical", because purples do very much have practical impact on performance in builds that benefit from high recharge.

I simply don't agree to that, for reasons explained above regarding asymptotic progressions. Are they the majority of the improvement? In any realistic build, almost certainly not. But I believe that, for characters where recharge is very significant, they can remain a significant part of the performance difference in an SO and a purple build.

Given my objection to the strength of your statements, you might find it odd that I agree, but I do. Despite the fact that I think that purples are materially valuable to many a high-end build, I agree that the people who make such a stink about their prices almost certainly still over-estimate that value.

I'm really not sure where you feel I claimed that. I think there's a relationship in that a lot of people want purples, and so money that's not being spent on purples is being used to buy them. I don't think of that as driving the market. Perhaps I'm forgetting something else I said, so do please remind me if so.

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Now I'm going to get into the nitpicking. I don't think it's really furthering our core debate, so feel free to respond or ignore as you see fit.

I think your assertion about Dom builds is going to depend wholly on the dom's powersets. I qualify this with the admission I am no expert on Dom builds, but I find it hard to accept that the majority of builds can hit perma Domination without purples and hit the L/S softcap. I'm willing to suppose most could hit the L/S softcap with a consistent diet of the same pool and epic powersets and a few Kinetic Combat sets. I also think whether this is "the most materially relevant" goal depends on what you're fighting. Personally I'm not a fan of L/S as the thing to cap unless you can't cap at least one positional defense instead. (From other non-melee ATs I'm aware that capping positional defenses can be hard to do without armors to build on, at least without undesirable trade-offs in other areas). I prefer capping Ranged defense where possible, because I've gotten my in-game-derriere handed too me too many times by stuff firing Dark, Electric or Rad blast powers. Doms have plenty of PBAoE and melee attacks, so I accept that Ranged defense may not be optimal for them either.

As I pointed out, that's not a universally applicable statement. What if you can't soft-cap your defense without unreasonable build sacrifices? Such builds do exist (they're actually fairly common), and the examples I gave were chosen not just because they have key click survival powers, but because it's not generally possible to soft-cap them. That makes driving the recharge as high as possible have "material influence" on their top-end performance.

I hate to tell you this, but I have characters that don't have enough recovery for how I play them even after Stamina, both +recovery uniques, and at least one, sometimes two Performance Shifter procs. I have used, where I couldn't fit in some other source of +recovery (either because I didn't have powers that took sufficiently useful sets or I would have had to scrap sets I really wanted), you probably guessed it, purples to fill the gap. Three of the right sets of purples, just two-slotted, falls right in between a Numina++ and a Miracle+. I actually slot fairly aggressively for end cost, too, where I can. Obliteration sets are cruel in this regard.

Overpriced is possibly debatable, since other factors than their actual benefits have to be accounted for in their price (like their rarity). However, I find those upgrades terribly attractive when they:

• Let me consolidate the recharge benefits of two sets of CI into one attack, freeing the other to slot a +defense set
• Significantly improve the slotted recharge of the attack, which is attractive for long-recharge, high DPA attacks
• Include a proc that can double or more the average DPA contribution of a low-damage power, including most tier-1 attacks.

"You" can. You just have to do as much, on average, as the other guys who get them, by whatever means it is they get them.

Of course, "you" might get lucky, or you might get unlucky, since the system is based on probabilistic rarity. That's why I said "on average".

What's key is that "you" have the basically the same opportunity for those shinies that pretty much everyone else does when they start.

(When I say *you*, above, I am not referencing you, specifically.)

No offense, but that's extension carrying the logic to ridiculous extremes, and it's simply outright false depending the character in question. If your powersets call for high-order recharge to have high performance, once you're past slotting all the LotGs you can there's just no better way in terms of return per slot to get the kind of recharge such builds can put to excellent use than to include multiple purple sets. And even after we get Incarnate abilities, to Flea's point, most of those sets would still continue to benefit from more recharge.

Case in point, <mostPrimaries>/Regen, <mostPrimaries>/Fiery Aura. Sure, is a huge part of increase in their performance in a high end build going to come from non-purple sets? Absolutely. But take a look at the recommendation for builds on anything /Regen, and you'll find many of the experts give +Recharge higher priority than +defense, because it's a huge part of those powersets' mitigation. Look at Dominators builds for those still seeking seeking (near) perma Domination for the mez protection and mez/sec benefits. There are plenty of examples where purples are just undeniably one of the most slot efficient ways to get the global recharge those builds want once you've maxed out on LotGs and taken Hasten.

I would never contend that every build benefits meaningfully from inclusion of purple sets, and almost never from something like including one of every purple set like we once had someone post about in here once. (They pretty much did it because they could.) But to claim that they're not "materially relevant to any practical performance discussion" (emphasis mine) is just plain false.

I'd accept the claim that they're not "materially relevant to every practical performance discussion" without pause.

Think of the weathered old 80/20 rule. If you're slotting purples and especially PvPOs, you can probably get 80% (say) of your performance benefit from IOs in 20% (say) of their cost. That last few percent improvement is still there to be had, but it's going to make your pockets bleed to buy it in comparison. If you, personally have better uses for that other 80% of your money then by all means, spend it on something else. I take the "max" in "min/max" to heart. I'm willing to fork out 80% of the cost (or whatever it really is) for that last 20% of improvement (or whatever it really is). The goal of maximization itself is more important to me than the cost required to get there, because I know I have the means to cover the cost. (I think you'll find that a fairly common mindset on the Scrapper forums.) But I do that when those gains are material, and I've seen those gains too often to accept your quote above.

So by all means, you, I and everyone else should make a point of trying to educate people that purples aren't the end-all-be-all of every build, and that all builds can improve dramatically without them, even when recharge is important. But lets not overstate things and somehow claim that purples don't do anything "materially relevant".

Yep.

With gleemail, most of the mechanical benefits of having two accounts have been made obsolete, but I still like getting two characters in a mission at once. Especially if it's something with rewards like a badge or merit-like things. If one can actually usefully control two characters at once, all the better.