UberGuy

Looks like maybe a timing thing, as in they fixed it while we were trying stuff.

I was doing various flushing and recycling, but still wasn't getting in. Then I read stuff online for a bit, tried again, and now I'm in.

It's currently 3 hours after the maintenance window today ended, but I still can't log in.

I'm theorizing that the IP address of the login servers have actually changed. When I try to log in, my game client acts just like it does when I have no internet, or no route to the login server.

I can see that the client is trying to connect using TCP to 216-107-249-131.plaync.com on port 2106. However, nothing ever replies (my system issues SYN_SENT, but nothing comes back).

Am I stuck waiting on Midwestern DNS servers to catch up to an IP address change?

I still can't log in, 3 hours after the maintenance window.

Was there an IP address change that has to propagate through DNS or something? My client times out when trying to connect to the login server.

I think the most important part about this, in terms of market impact, is what it will do to relative pricing between things only Alignment Merits (AMs) can buy and things you can buy with both AMs or Reward Merits (RMs).

Here's a basically fictional example of what I mean.

Let's say today that an LotG global can be sold for around 150M, and a purple for around 300M. Roughly speaking, if you can get two LotGs and sell them, you can buy one purple.

Let's say that a LotG costs 5 AMs, and a purple costs 15 AMs. Now let's say that, after the dust settles, we figure out that a single AM has a market worth around roughly 15M inf. The part about the dust settling is important, because I'm talking about letting people figure out the rate they can earn AMs, and the resulting opportunity cost relative to grinding out raw inf or RMs.

Theoretically, if enough people have access to this system to grind out AMs as a way of producing things, the price of both purples and LotGs should drop. In the limit, purples would drop to 225M and LotGs would drop to 75M. (I don't believe it would converge so perfectly, but bear with me for the sake of the example.)

The prices went down. That's great, right?

Not so much for people who actually try to use the market to earn their way to purples by selling non-purple stuff. This situation would be a loss in earning power for sellers, because instead of being able to buy a purple after selling two LotGs, now they have to sell 3.

Now I picked these numbers out of thin air - I have no specific reason to think this is the ratio of purple to non-purple costs we'll end up with. Still, I want to raise it up as something I find a bit worrying as a possibility. If the devs choose a poor ratio for the price of stuff in the AM "store" to the price of stuff you can get with RMs, they're can actually make the market less effective at letting people buy the RM-only goods.

I'm trying to figure out what explanation is worse...

• That they didn't know that it would take the forums with it...
• Or that it didn't occur to anyone to mention it.

I have my "bread and butter" attacks on numbers 1-4. If I have a Build-Up-like power, it's always number 5. If I have attacks that I use often but not all the time, they are on alt+1-4. I have all these powers in my tray, but rarely click on them, instead using the trays primarily to monitor recharge.

Things like my armor/mez protection toggles (when I have them) end up in the third tray and thus bound to control+number. When I have a self heal, I bind it to the tilde key, and if I have two, I bind one to alt+tilde.

My travel powers are always bound to my mouse side buttons, using binds that will cycle between them where appropriate. For example, I have one button that will cycle between hover/fly or CJ/superjump. For fliers, I also have a mouse button bound that will turn off hover/fly and turn on sprint.

Esoteric things that I don't use very often but want to have handy are put on extra trays. As mentioned, you can have up to 10 trays. If you want a new one, click the "+" on your regular trays and you'll be given a new, "floating" one. I now have three additional trays open on most of my characters, with ones at the top of the screen holding things like temp powers and various teleporters and Ouroboros. When I want to use these things, I click on them with the mouse.

Edit: I don't think you can use "regular" keys as modifiers the way you can alt, shift and control. However, you can use modifiers with your mouse buttons. (Alt+Button1 for example.)

This isn't a complaint, but there's nothing in that system that says that someone who wanted to not lose their earned H/VMs wouldn't just spend them and then set about switching. I mean, yeah, you could lose them, but I'm not real sure why anyone would, at least not short of a serious dedication to roleplay. (That or a lack of interest in actually spending H/VMs at all).

I mentioned this earlier, but I want to expand on it in case it's not clear to you (Driver 8) as a new player.

The curve in how much characters earn at a given level is not linear with level. It's actually roughly exponential. Near level 50, characters are earning hundreds of times more inf per foe defeated than, say, a level 10. This is then compounded by the fact that near-50s also fight over-level foes more easily, which are worth even more, and can also probably fight and defeat many more foes in the same elapsed time.

At low levels, it probably seems like nonsense to you that anyone would pay so much more than they need to in order to buy something, but compared to you, they are probably making vastly more inf per hour played.

Interestingly, the market was explicitly viewed as a means for such wealthy high-level characters to pour their money on lowbies. This is one of the reasons why certain things only exist at low levels - the primary way for high-level characters to get them was supposed to be buying them from low-level characters. (As an aside, this hasn't worked that well for recipes - the "good" low-level ones are too rare compared to how long characters are at the levels where they drop.)

A couple of things you might not be up on... as nice as fancy inventions can be, you absolutely don't need them to play the game. The game was created and ran a long time before Inventions were added, basically all of the content is designed around on the assumption that you don't have them.

Before we had a market, it was actually somewhat challenging (and fairly widely considered annoying) to keep yourself equipped in Training (TO), Dual-Origin (DO) and Single-Origin (SO) enhancements. However, in today's market world, you can make more than enough to buy those even if you list your drops rather unintelligently on the market. Your most likely bread winners are actually low- and mid-level arcane salvage. These are needed by people who want to craft Common Invention Enhancements, but high-level characters have to go out of their way to obtain such salvage. They tend to throw a lot of money at lowbies for this salvage compared to what lowbies need to be self sufficient.

To get a sense of what's good to sell, the things to look at in the price history are the dates on the last 5 history, the number of bidding, and the number of listings.

In general, something will sell quickly if it has lots of bidders and either few listings or a rapid pace of transaction in the history.

The more of something is for sale compared to its number of bidders, the lower you want to list to ensure you move the item, assuming you bother to sell it at all. A low rate of transaction in the history compounds this - something with lots for sale and a low sale rate is going to be harder to move.

The more bidders there are compared to the number for sale, the more likely you can sell at a high price. If something has a lot of bidders, few for sale, and you list for any price up to something in the last 5 history you're probably guaranteed an immediate sale. If you list for more you still might sell in fairly short order, but possibly not immediately.

Remember, in this market, the buyer buys listing that had the lowest sale price lower than the bidder's price, so selling things fast is about being the lowest price seller. How far down the scale you're willing to go is something of an art. You want to be high enough not to be swept up by people looking for ridiculous bargains but low enough to undercut most everyone else. The more people are bidding and the fewer of the item are for sale, the less likely it is you will be bought by a bargain hunter, and more likely you are to be bought by someone who wants one right now.

The people who think they want price caps want a fixed-price store. Price caps on an actual market won't do what anyone who has suggested it thinks it would.