UberGuy

Seemingly a lot less that the number of people slotting Stealth IOs. It's almost as if Stealth IOs are easier to obtain...

The fact that it relies on hits landing doesn't mean that it misses more often than other stuff. It means that it's potentially impacted more by missing, which is different.

Of course I tend not to use my combos much, generally only using Vitals Strike when I can hit a lot of foes with it, so that doesn't actually affect my DB/Regen much.

You wandering into a conversation days after it petered out and applying arbitrary limitations on how people play the game is meaningless on many layers.

Earning an arbitrary level Stealth IO is easier than earning a desirable PvPIO or desirable purple IO in every possible way one can try to obtain them. Desirable here is defined by the items that have high demand compared to their supply. That's what my statement meant in context.

When people talk about the price of PvPOs in the abstract, do you assume they're talking about the ones that very few people slot?

You can't spend Reward Merits at all to get a purple or PvPO, and spending Alignment Merits on a Stealth IO will cost you 1/10 or less than a purple or PvPO. Moreover, you can only obtain certain, generally unpopular purples and PvPOs for 100M or less. My assertion stands.

New FE is teh sexay. Between that and the change to burn, my SM/FA Brute changed very radically. Against non-hard targets I got significantly more survivable simply because I kill faster, including killing faster in an AoE simply because of Burn. (In the scope of things, it's small potatoes, but FE causes Fault to do non-trivial damage, which is boosted by Build Up. Killing things with it makes me giggle.)

I have a friend in game who had a MA/FE Scrapper that I18 transformed from a relatively mild-mannered Scrapper (as mild-mannered as any Scrapper loaded to the gills with IOs and PvPOs can be) into a DPS monster.

Where do you get this stuff?

Mind-altering substances are bad, mkay?

We've been able to trade cash and goods off-market for ages, and we can trade vastly more than 2B worth of goods in a single transaction. Apparently, you think that using the trade interface that's part of the documented game interface is a violation of the terms of service. Classic.

I was going to be rather surprised if they kept up the GR staffing increases after GR. Now, it's not at all clear that's what's going on here, but it's also not clear it doesn't bode well.

Edit: I had a lot of respect for how BaBs interacted with us on the forums. I also definitely felt he put a lot of effort into the game, and I can think of at least two cases where he spent time working on things brought up here on the forums specifically because he knew from the forums that people wanted them. And of course, I dug how much he interacted with us.... at least until he stopped. Those were, in my opinion, endearing qualities. They will be missed.

Assuming it's thematic at all, it's likely based in the notion that you can't dodge something aimed at your mind. The positional defense types are meant to represent your ability to physically dodge projectiles, etc.

Of course, the entire Psi Blast powerset lies outside this thematic explanation, since all of its attacks are, in fact, typed as both Ranged and Psi for defense purposes. This is probably a situation where balance and theme were in conflict - creating an entire blast damage set that bypassed positional defense probably was harder to accept than various mezzes. Note that the "no dodging mind attacks" theme isn't just for Psi mezzes. Fearsome Stare from Dark Miasma also lacks a positional typing, being tagged only Negative Energy.

That's a nice claim. Can you back it up with some evidence for how successful they are, preferably along with some screenshots of some of their successes? If they're really doing this, I'm sure they could provide evidence from some previous niche where it would no longer damage their profits.

There's a lot of excellent evidence to suggest this sort of thing is not easy or reasonable to do, especially when so many other vastly easier money-making schemes exist that require no "manipulation" at all*. It makes hand-waved claims of how common it is extremely dubious, and not likely to be accepted without some decent evidence.

*Example: buying recipes and selling the crafted IO, which can produce anywhere from 50% to 1000% profit, depending on the item in question.

Edit: and it really doesn't matter if you're manipulating the market or not. Since you know people who do this, it should be simple for you to go find out what they're doing, then take Mac's money and replicate it. After all, you may not be able to convince these people you know to prove what they're up to, so why don't you do it and put the argument to rest?

Yeah, I have the whole of the market forum, and every guide about the market in the guides section of the forums.

I have an understanding of supply and demand, and an awareness of the fact that, no matter how distorted supply and demand are here compared to a "real world" market due to things like a lack of manufacturing costs of the differences in earning potential between, say, a level 50 and a level 10, the fundamentals suggested by supply and demand do apply, and readily explain nearly every market behavior we see.

I am vastly more of a supplier to the market than a buyer - I build high-performance solo characters, use I16's wonderful difficulty settings to fight lots of spawns regularly (and not just farming), and sell a lot of what I get. Acting as a supplier tells me that price manipulation that people like you claim is possible pretty much is not.

At any given time, there is a top-end band of sale prices a seller needs to sell at if they want their product to move, and setting the price above that is not generally successful - the product will sit there for days, weeks, or even months. You have to pick a price where enough people are interested in buying that other sellers won't consistently undercut you, because most sellers want the quick sale.

This is where the phrase "buyers set the price" comes from. A lot of posters claim that can't be true, because they can't just go in and get the price they want. That's because one buyer isn't the "buyers" in the phrase. The "buyers" are the aggregate of people buying stuff on the market setting the most common top-end price for a given item. There are people trying to buy for less, but the top-enders out bid them consistently. There are people buying for more, but they aren't buying in enough volume to make selling at their higher bid price worth while.

The only time you can set your own price as a seller is when the demand for the item greatly exceeds its supply, because in that scenario your item may be one of only very few for sale (if not the only one). Someone may pay your price because there are people who have more money than <deity> and will throw prices down until they buy what you have to sell.

It's critically important to note that this market's demand and supply are not just the number of bids and offers - 0 for sale and lots bidding is not sufficient to let the seller set their price. You need 0 for sale, lots bidding, and a low rate of supply from other sellers. If you try to create low sale and high bid count by buying all the stock of something that's well-supplied just to create an artificial price spike, you're extremely likely to end up suffering a loss because the other sellers will jump onto the sale bandwagon, and you'll lose money trying to buy their stock to sustain your new price.

One of the most excellent explanations of how to manipulate prices on the market was posted a long time ago in the market forums. It involves buying up items, sort of like you suggest. This creates a sort of rising tide of prices, as impatient and/or rich buyers pay whatever it takes to buy what you're sucking up supply of. But as this happens, other sellers will start selling the product at these higher prices they see in the history. This means that to keep on top of incoming supply, you have to keep buying at higher and higher prices. Eventually the price will peak and recede again, as more people with stock or even just flippers jump in on the newly created niche.

At some point you need to decide when to get out. Get out too early and the price swell will probably collapse. (Even if it doesn't, its other people who reap the profits.) Get out too late and the price will recede before you can sell all the stock you had to buy, and you end up eating a loss.

In any case, this was not something you could just wander in and succeed at on demand. It took a lot of trial and error, and while the profits were great when it worked, it was a lot easier to get screwed than to make a profit. No one is just casually walking into the market, jacking up the price of X until they make the profit they want, then wandering away.

Finally, people see conspiracies in places where much more prosaic explanations are sufficient. One of the most basic is that salvage supply dips (and attendant price spikes) are commonly cause by badge crafters. People going for field crafter, or just for the increased salvage slot (L25-30 recipes) and increase recipe slot (L45-50) bonuses will come in and deplete stock of common salvage. It's hard to make a dent in the number of Mathematic Proofs, because they are wildly oversupplied compared to their demand, but things like Nevermelting Ice and Alchemical Silver have an awful lot of things that call for them, and fewer people tend to produce them.

This is exactly the kind of "and keep it there" that Mac is talking about.

If you think this is possible, take his money and go do it, then come back and post your evidence.

Of course, when we consider that they also never expected anyone to do things like 2 ACC/4 DAM, we can see how doomed their predictions really were.

No, really. They figured we'd slot a sprinkling of each possible type of enhancement. Notably, very early on, I did do that, because I didn't understand how the enhancements worked. (No "real numbers" of any sort back then, nothing close to Mid's modern info or RedTomax's site ... it was the dark ages.) Sadly, I think that meant the devs figured people would slot like that because either (a) the devs didn't understand how the powers worked (entirely likely for some of them, possibly including the powers devs) or (b) they assumed we'd never figure out how things worked.

First of all, last we were updated on it or that anyone tested it, drops from mobs are equal probability. That's actually the problem - we all want way more attack, hold and heal sets than we want fear, snipe or sleep sets, but every one of those sets almost no one wants is just as likely to appear as something awesome that we actually want.

Second, when it comes to ticket and TF random rolls, the devs actually weighted it towards things more of us do want. So yes, those are weighted, but generally in our favor.

No, it hasn't. I'm pretty sure this has been stated in other threads where you have discussed this. Temp powers are in a separate drop pool from IO recipes. Each drop pool has it's own drop check. You can get both an IO recipe and a temp power recipe from defeating the same mob.

Actually, as far as we know, drop weighting only applies to random rolls you can make at vendors, such as R-Merit and AE Ticket rolls. I believe we were told directly that weighting was not applied to any mob drops, which would include purples.

Since that time, extremely rare pool C/D drops were added to bosses. I don't think anyone knows if any weighting is applied to their drop table.

I would hope/assume that such weighting applies to A-Merit random rolls bought from the A-Merit vendors. Of course purples aren't included in those rolls anyhow.

I have to say that I feel you're seemingly arguing an extremely slippery slope, here. All IOs are not the same in terms of either "power level" or difficulty to obtain. Stealth IOs are not even remotely as hard to obtain as purples or PvP IOs. I can accept the argument that inventions are an important part of character customization, though I do not agree with it as a blanket statement. But all inventions are not the same, and I do not accept the argument that all of them need to have the same levels of availability. Even "Rare" invention recipes have relatively low barriers to entry, especially since the addition of alignment merits. Best of all, those barriers to access aren't uniformly high - you only need to spend reward or alignment merits on the items with the highest barriers; the rest (and the majority) can be obtained on the market at price levels that are reasonable to attain through regular play and thus without "marketeering".

Also, your claims that random drop mechanisms are not good is a subjective opinion. Without the acquisition ladder to climb, I probably would have gotten tired to playing this game sometime around I12-14. Having goals to "work" towards has kept me interested.

Completely separate from whether or not your end goal is laudable, your grasp of what's going on in this game's markets is nonexistent.

Once again, "weighted" and "random" are not somehow mutually exclusive.

Most of our characters at level 50 have a 95% chance to hit foes, if we can help it. That does not mean that our hit rolls, and thus our chance to miss, are not random*. It means that the number we roll is random, and that the outcome is heavily weighted in our favor.

There is no confusion over MMO-specific use of terms in the post you quoted. The confusion seems to be this odd misconception that random implies equally likely outcomes.

* Where "random" in this case means pseudo-random, which for practical purposes is going to appear truly random as far as we players can determine, unless the devs either don't use a good RNG algorithm, or fail to use a good one properly. Such misapplication of a good RNG has happened before, specifically with the bug allowing specific spawns to be found that always dropped a recipe in maps with hand-placed spawns.

No offense intended, but when it comes to asking for buffs, I could give a rats tooshie what makes thematic sense. I'm going to ask for what is most helpful.

If you're saying that recharge resistance doesn't make sense because you don't think it's what would be most helpful, I have no idea why our experiences with the powerset would be so divergent.