UberGuy

This is never going to get the devs to take action. And we probably wouldn't want it to. Remember, there's no guarantee that the devs would approach this by buffing MA.

The devs care about performance being in some acceptable band. They look at things like how fast/slow people playing a set level, and how many people play a set. If they don't see an issue there, they're less likely to take action.

It's one thing to say that MA isn't as good as DM but another thing to say that MA sucks. I'm of the opinion that MA could very much use some love, but not that it sucks. I'd love for it to have higher DPS or better control/mitgation - particularly on Stalkers where it has no AoE at all. But I have an MA Stalker, and it's not like it plays badly. It just doesn't play as well as I'd like.

Actually, we don't know how that will work for sure. They haven't said they'll put the money back on our characters. They've just said that they will mark bids canceled.

People are assuming that, because right now there's no way to have a "canceled" bid sit there with money to claim, that it can't work that way. It's certainly a safe assumption, and I'd recommend that anyone who can, claim their market stuff no matter what is really going to happen.

I do seem to recall that it fell of faster after 80%. What I'm recalling isn't a curve, just a step increase. Unfortunately, I can't remember why I think that was the case, and I can't reconcile that memory with what I'm seeing in City of Data.

That doesn't mean that they aren't doing it for some of the "we told you so" reasons.

It's only my opinion, but what I do not think motivated them to do this was real concern about the health of the markets. Instead, what WW says motivated it was a recognition of the on-going maintenance and development of code to "artificially" separate the markets. The escrow system, checks on what you could and couldn't trade, etc. were all creations they could just dump if they merged the markets. The idea that we get a stronger supply/demand pool seems to be a nice side effect didn't even make honorable mention - greater freedom of RP was the 2nd runner up.

But numerous posters, including quite a few who I rarely saw speak up on market matters, had posted in response to earlier GR market info releases, and many of them said they thought it was crazy to invent these new barriers, systems, and potentially a new currency. It seemed like an awful lot of work and complexity to maintain segregation. (Of course it helps to think that a merger would be a better situation than segregation with no other changes.) On that part, the devs do seem to have agreed.

In my experience and opinion, roleplaying justifications for mechanical and/or balance things should have strong or good tie in with the mechanical reality of the thing they're justifying. I stand by the assertion that if this is what she meant, she didn't do a very good job of it. That may not be on her head - perhaps she was stating what will be "formal" canon about a Praetorean market. Even if it's on her head, it could be for as simple a reason as that she came up with it on the fly as she wrote that post - something I can easily forgive. That doesn't mean it's a good description or explanation, and it's not the one I would give were I ad-libbing it on the fly.

Just as I may be reading it to literally, it should be considered that others may be reading it too dogmatically.

As I mentioned, that doesn't make sense. It especially doesn't make sense after a merged market, and she posted about the additional supply in a 2nd post, following up the post about the market merge. In a merged market, where you play is irrelevant - it can't ever be considered additional supply.

Now, that doesn't mean that isn't what she meant. But if that's what she meant, what she said is a terribly inaccurate way of saying it. She made it sound like something new, and if it's just Praetorean markets, it's only new in the sense that Praetorea itself is new, and not new volume. You can't even assume its a reference to new players - that doesn't fit the description she gave, unless you assume all new players play in Praetorea. But we know that would be inaccurate too, because as far as we know, it is a low level area. (Persumably this may change later.) Once characters outlevel Praetorea, they become heroes, villains or something in-between. They stop being suppliers from Praetorea unless the player stops and starts again with a new lowbie.

I would be shocked if they went in for a mere factor of 2 over the cost of the current top-end merit prices. I'm thinking a factor of five would be the bare minimum, and a factor of 10 or more is probably likely.

For most goods, merits are a very inefficient way to buy things compared to the market. That's almost certainly intentional. The devs likely want merits to be an option that people use with caveats and limitations, but they want them to use the market more often. To do that, the market has to be a more time effective option. What you're describing would create a flight from the market to the merit vendors, which would have a spiraling negative effect on the market. That's very likely why merit prices on most goods are very high compared to the "value" of merits as computed by the number of merits it takes to buy the goods you can sell for the most money on the market. That high cost acts as a damping factor in the feedback loop between the two. Putting the damping factor at a mere 2x price (500M inf isn't even a factor of 2 over some of them today, especially on the BM) almost certainly isn't enough.

In any case, I find it extremely unlikely that the devs will ever allow us to buy merits with money. As the market merge has shown us, anything is possible, but they have been pretty dead set on merits being reward for very personal, per-character achievement. Letting them be bought with inf removes that completely. I'm not sure there are as many reasons for them to go back on that position as there were for them to reconsider a merge.

Actually, I think seeding is somewhat likely. I think it's somewhat unlikely because I'm not at all sure how they'd come up with a sale price for seeded items. However, if they came up with a way to base it on actual sale trends, I think it would achieve something quite different than increasing drop rates.

Consider that Positron had previously stated, back when the devs were saying the markets would not merge, that they had plans for helping "improve" the markets. I do believe this was said at least in part to posts about how fallow the villain market is. Now, War Witch has posted about previously unknown suppliers to both WW and the BM. This cannot reasonably be a reference to Praetorean characters in a merged market scenario, because playing in one place means you aren't playing in another, and so you can't be considered additional supply. One way both of these could have be (or have been) done is with market seeding.

Raising drop rates directly has impacts on balance outside the market. It makes the good in question universally easier to acquire by all players, whether they participate in the market or not. It's a universal shift in average time-to-achieve for attaining that good.

Dribbling stuff into the market is similar, but not the same. First, it's not universal - it only shifts time-to-achieve for people who use the market. Second, if you find a way to make it dynamic, only supplying things that have lots of demand and little supply, you can also make it self adjusting, so that it doesn't universally glut the supply of that good. (I don't claim this is simple, only possible.)

An increase in drop rate is a hammer. Dynamically seeding the market is potentially a scalpel. You can do grievous harm with both, but the limit on how well you can fine-tune a hammer is a lot more coarse.

Seeding has another advantage. It can help keep the markets liquid in the face of declining player base.

I think that a seeding system would also be a rather nifty inf sink, but I would be surprised if that were actually a consideration in creating it. I think rather that it would be a moderately beneficial side-effect.

Edit: I thought of something else. It's very hard for the devs to change supply of any given thing inside the drop pools without affecting everything else. Right now, they can only change the drop probabilities of entire pools and the relative probability of a given item within the pools. For example, they can make Numina's Convalescence drops more common, but that means you get less of everything else - Numina's drops take the place of other goods. You also can't currently make the drop rate of a level 40 Numina different from a level 50 one. A seeder has none of these limitations. If you saw the need, you could increase the supply of Numina's recipes without affecting the supply of anything else.

You're using a different definition of "price". When people discussing this topic talk about "the price" they're talking about something akin to the average price in the last 5, or over the course of the day or week. (Those of us who use the market a lot can readily keep a sense of the long-term trends on an item beyond the last five sales history.)

If you go list a Doctored Wounds: Heal/Recharge for 100M inf, you've certainly set your sale price, but you're very, very unlikely to set "the price" people see in the last five sales history. That price is strongly affected by what people have paid before.

When I see people who think that sellers control that price, I feel pretty sure that I'm reading the posts of people who don't actually sell stuff on the market very often, or who never try to push the price envelope when they do. I sell a lot of stuff, and I typically try to get my sales near the top end of "the price". Many, many times I have come in too high, and had "the price" drop, leaving me stuck with items for sale for one or more weeks without movement.

In fact, experienced market sellers know that this can result from listing your item at "the price". If something is selling for 10M inf, and you list yours for 10M inf, you can often expect your sale to sit unfulfilled for days or even weeks, even if the item keeps selling for 10M inf. Why? Because other sellers are undercutting your list price. They expect people to buy the item at or near 10M inf, and they price their sales somewhere below that, but near enough to it to not be swept up by bargain seekers or flippers.

The price that experienced sellers list at is governed by what buyers are doing. If buyers keep paying more and more for something, savvy sellers will keep raising the price. If buyers lose interest and stop paying as much for something, or buy it much less often at high prices, savvy sellers reduce their list price.

This is the primary benefit. While I am not personally concerned with "inflation" as we're describing it here, that's because I use the market. Lessening the rate of increase of the price of items on the market makes "playing the game" more competitive with market use as a means of attaining market-relevant income levels.

I agree with ST. The issue is that there are more things we can do that produce inf than there are to produce what we spend inf on. Just to pick a narrow example, if someone plays a 50 a lot, but spends most of that time exemplared down or in the AE, then they produce just as much inf as any other 50, but produce zero purple drops.

Looking at the markets, I'd say pools A and B look well-supplied, at least at level 50 and especially since I16. Pool C/D has taken both an intentional and (I believe) an unintentional hit with the introduction of merits. I believe many people hoard merits and/or spend them on specific goods, and I'd bet that these secondary effects put the real pool C/D supply rate under the devs' design targets. The devs probably mitigated this somewhat with the introduction of boss drops from those pools, but I have no way to quantify it. Based on my anecdotal experience with how people use it, I'd say that most use of the AE ends up decreasing drop rates - the only times it clearly appeared to increase them was when I14 was brand new, and the ticket cap was still 9999.

This seems mostly unlikely, unless the real supply rates are below where the devs wanted them. There are balance considerations involved, in terms of how much time the devs want players to spend chasing IOs.

I'm not sure this would have that much of an impact. I know players of games where something like 1000 gold pieces is a huge investment, and they speak of that sum in the same breathy tones that folks use when talking about 80 million dollar lottery pots. People seem to to rapidly adjust their expectations with regards to what qualifies as "a lot of money" rapidly based on their own earning levels.

A more meaningful change, in my opinion, would be to flatten the slope of the inf earning rate vs. level we have in CoH. I'm not of the opinion that this is terribly important to do, but it certainly would cause less of the stories of wide-eyed awe with which people who don't play level 50s regard the price of things like Miracles, LotGs and purples.

I left a 2B inf bid for one out for 7 weeks, and took it down. I got mine off market.

That would be the devs that created the following situations.

• 50s make more money than everyone else.
• It's become progressively easier to reach level 50, thanks to benefits like XP smoothing and Patrol XP.
• A little known part of XP smoothing was that mobs lower-level than you became worth less reward than previously and higher-level mobs became worth more.
• IOs increased our survivability, how fast we can attack, how much damage we can do on average, and how long we can fight non-stop. This had the effect of improving how many foes we can fight at once, how many levels over us they are, or both.
• Before I16 it was easy to build characters that could survive (and defeat) many more foes than they could actually face in a mission. The new difficulty settings changed that. When you at your peak sustainable level instead of below it, you maximize your reward rate.
• Right after I16, the devs approximately doubled the amount of inf level 50s gain for defeated foes when you average across the ranks and their distribution in normal missions.

Edit: Those are just the completely legit ways the rate of money produced in the system has been increasing. It doesn't even touch the basically two whole issues of massive balance loopholes in the AE that had people producing vast amounts of inf (and XP) while simultaneously producing less of whole classes of goods to spend it on. Eventuially, lower ticket caps meant that vast potential numbers of AE ticket rolls never materialized, even for those who theoretically could have otherwise been pumping items into the market. (Whether they would have is a different question, but I can tell you that about 2 weeks into I14 to the introduction of ticket caps was the most volume I ever saw on the Black Market, before or since.)

The reason people are paying 100M to 1B for rare items is because they have it. Extremely conservative estimates suggest that 1B inf is created every hour on average. The market allows market sellers to aggregate that wealth from multiple buyers. Sell rare stuff and you get to aggregate wealth from other aggregators. Then you get to turn around and spend that on some super shiny item.

If the devs want prices to fall, they need to increase the number of ways we get rid of inf in the system. I should point out that one interpretation of the "new supply" that WW mentions is that they plan to "seed" the market with stuff. If so, done carefully, this could be a wonderful inf sink. If you end up buying some fancy rare IO from an automated system, 100% of your inf vanishes from circulation.

We have no evidence for or against the notion that the market is slow because of transaction volumes. There's no good reason to conclude that merging the volume will actually meaningfully worsen the behavior. Among other things, sometimes players on one or two game servers experience market lag while others have no problem. The issue could be some communication layer between game and market servers.

Actually no, they have been down independently before. We have also had times when one was slow and the other was not even for players logged into the same game server. After GR, they may be linked more directly, though, or even consolidated into one server.

This is really important. Market participation has its own positive feedback loop. If not a lot of people are participating, this is a disincentive to those who might otherwise be willing to. Merging the markets may increase the percentage of villain players who regularly use the markets to list goods for sale.

I do still consider it likely that heroes may experience higher prices and villains lower ones. However, I'd like to point out that other game changes before now have had absolutely transformative impact on prices. The introduction of merits, the creation of the AE (and the long period of exploits), I16's difficulty sliders, even influx of new players on major issue releases - all of these have had drastic affects on prices in various (sometimes large) segments of the market. I'm honestly not sure we're going to be able to discern the difference here, especially not as new changes continue to come into play.

Edit: I should also add the general reminder that wholesale market price shifts are largely irrelevant to players who actually sell goods on the market for monetary gain. When prices go up, so do your market earnings.

And the devs have told us this where?

I agree we should avoid pay for performance. However, I'm not fond of balancing strong buffs with a risk of strong debuffs. A strong enough debuff to make people really worry about using the power is going to be viewed in a very poor light when the debuff actually materializes. I predict people viewing it like the "perma debt" of old - they suffer the debuff, consider it crippling, and don't want to play the character until it wears off. But there's a problem - the effects count logged in time, so you can't get rid of the effect without leaving your character logged in.

There are a few ways to go about avoiding this kind of situation. A very simplistic one is to go for weaker buffs, and then balance them with weaker debuffs. This is much how Mystic Fortune works, though I also think it has weaker debuffs to keep if feeling like someone else screwed you over; a self-buff has different implications. They could also make the effects count "real" time and not logged in time. A less simplistic approach deals with the duration and recasting - I think both this and Mystic Fortune should be dismissible, but you should be stuck with a timer that still won't let you get a replacement buff until the original buff or debuff duration would have ended. This way you could get some obnoxious debuff, potentially rid yourself of it (ideally you'd have to suffer under it for a minute or two), but not replace the effect until you would have been able to even had you kept the original.

Leadership toggles only affect teammates, not all allies in radius. That said, you can still get a much larger than 8-man team, once you include things like pets, so your point still stands, but it's actually both more generally applicable than just raids, and not quite as bad.

No one with that proposed version of the power would want to be on a team with a Mastermind or probably even a Fire Control character, though.

This is pretty important. There's a lot of flexibility for the devs in saying that this power (or powerset) does less X and more Y. For example, they can decide that a powerset deals less "raw" damage because it applies powerful debuffs, or provides its users some kind of strong mitigation when it attacks.

This doesn't always make sense to players, because they may think that Y isn't important, but that X is. If the powerset in question has the lowest X of all the alternatives, those players are likely to complain that the powerset is "gimp".

But that doesn't always hold. Y may have great utility in certain situations. Is the balance between X and Y right? That's a tough question to answer. The devs seem to measure things like that, at least in one way, by looking at the speed that certain ATs or powersets level. Either they're capable enough to level "fast enough" when solo and/or desirable enough that they get on teams that can help them along. Is this a perfect window into balance? Definitely not, but it does show things that aren't likely apparent to any one player.

You're missing a larger point here. Those are, indeed, fringe cases. But if the tools to enable such amazing levels of performance are available, allowing one to build fringe cases, they illustrate that there's an incredible dynamic range in available potential for endurance management. Those fringe builds are usually chock full of every endurance management tool available to them, but you don't need all that to be brimming with enough endurance for much less extreme levels of play.

The tools are available. The effect can be mitigated, and more than sufficiently.

Ultimo, you were doing fine until you got to the last three sentences quoted there, and the last one in particular.

It can't be sufficiently mitigated? What are you talking about? Apparently, "sufficiently mitigated" should be "can fight forever." Which, I should point out, is actually possible, even on some extremely endurance heavy characters. (I have a Night Widow who's getting pretty close to being able to defeat continuous +2/x8 spawns without stopping unless end drains are involved.)