UberGuy

Speaking from experience on where these can appear, the wiki is correct.

I would say there's a bit more at play in this example, as well. The Obliteration set provides two extremely attractive set bonuses: 5% global recharge and 3.75% melee defense. In contrast, Mako's Bite provides only one highly attractive bonus, 3.75% ranged defense. But Mako's has strong competition: the Blessing of the Zephyr set gives 3.13% ranged defense for just two pieces, where it takes all six to get Mako's defense bonus. Most everyone who wants ranged defense has travel powers, but not everyone who wants ranged defense has melee attacks.

So what pool it's in drives the supply side of the price, but the demand side is affected by multiple factors, including what the sets do, what they can be slotted in, what else you might want to slot where they can be slotted, and what alternatives for similar benefits (slottable in the same place or elsewhere) are available.

It does. There are essentially 3 overlapping blast radii. All three stack in the middle radius, then the outer two stack, and then there's the last one for the foes the furthest out. Foes caught further away take less damage due to being in less overlapping effects.

Without farmers, the supply would be lower and the prices would probably be higher. Of course there would be less inf floating around, so inflation might be lower, but farmers who don't farm for inf at the expense of tickets in the AE at least keep the average ratio of inf to drops consistent... for pool A stuff. Farmers who farm in the AE, whether they spend tickets before capping out or not, increase the ratio of inf to purples and raise prices, so cutting them out reduces that ratio and possibly lowers prices.

Self-appointed beacons of light like yourselves usually fail to notice that we so-called marketeers actually want the market to be functional. The vast majority of suggestions we see here are absolutely horrifyingly dumb, because they would disrupt the ability of players, including farmers like yourself, to disperse your goods among the players. They will either dissuade people from putting stuff on the market, force people to wait in line in a first-come-first-served fashion no matter how much money they have, or have other affects a lot of people consider unpleasant.

Taking all the farmers out of the system would do nothing to marketeers. They ride the ebb and flow of supply and demand, and they will always be in the upper echelons of the wealthy and thus the better equipped. If the market is moving a lot of items for cheap or a few items for piles of money, marketeers don't really care, because in either case the marketeers make what they need to buy what they want.

All marketeers want is a market that functions to move goods among the players efficiently where a smart or patient player can find bargains. Enterprising people who find bargains can use them to earn a profit, more or less like in the real world (see pawn shops and antique stores).

Ideas like increasing the info in the sales history would probably reduce margins for flippers because it would serve to reduce price volatility. Some marketeers may oppose that sort of thing. I don't actually marketeer per se, so I don't actually care much one way or the other. It would also probably serve to reduce the ability to find bargains for "regular" players too, though.

No it won't. That you think this makes clear a fundamental lack of understanding of how this all works. If stuff is more common, prices are lower, flippers and manipulators make less money per scheme, but they need less money to buy everything. For flippers and other manipulators changes in supply are largely a wash.

Pretty much.

There are powers in every powerset that a majority of min/maxers probably agree are extremely important to have. There are well-known pool powers that are considered extremely desirable, and so show up in a lot of builds. Even still, some people don't take travel powers to fit in more attacks or pools. Some people don't take Fitness because they are satisfied with the recovery available from IOs.

And inventions means that any given power may have a wide variety of slotting options. Do you want lots of bonus damage? Lots of recharge? Lots of defense? Lots or Regen? Do you plan to exemplar a lot? Do you PvP? All of these things can change what you think is "optimal" slotting.

If your sets give you lots of accuracy, then you can safely slot other sets with low or possibly even no accuracy enhancement. If you aren't going for defense, a lot of sets have a desirable bonus in the 5th slot, so you often see 5 of one set and then a 6th IO from somewhere else to round out enhancement values.

IOs created vastly more enhancement diversity than the universal limitation of the same name ever did.

Can you please point out a specific example, instead of laying out a generality that can't be rebutted?

Can you please point out a specific example of a rational point being quietly sidestepped, that you would instead like to see answered specifically?

A great deal of time is spent here (in the forum in general) trying to counter outrageous charges because a great deal of outrageous charges are put forth.

I just don't know what to make of how full of yourself seem to be.

No, sorry, I wasn't clear.

My point was more that it was an incredibly long-standing bug that no one was complaining about. Their having "fixed" it had pretty obvious and possibly not desirable effects on the in-game market, yet they blithely did it anyway, just because it wasn't working as originally intended.

That, and this Numi/Miracle/Regen thing feel like bugs they probably could have left alone, but fixed "just because they were broken."

The problem here is that people aren't trying to say you can should bid any low-ball price you feel like and expect get an item (though it's possible you can get anything for any low price if you wait long enough). They're saying that if the price is really currently inflated over the average/low/typical price, you can bid that more sedate price and expect to get the item in some time scale that's not completely ridiculous.

But what I just said is longer and adding in all the conditional branches makes it harder to say and read, so people contract it. Then meaning gets lost, either in the saying or the reading.

If any given player thinks that paying 10M inf for Doc Delilah's Shovel: Chance for Landslide is outrageous, but every other player is willing to pay 10M inf, our given player is probably out of luck. The whole place-a-bid-and-wait strategy is for people willing to bid 8M when the going rate is 10, or who will place a 10M inf bid and go away because the price is 25M when they went to buy one. The guy who bids 1M inf and crosses his fingers might as well have bought a Paragon City lottery ticket.

Yeah, this is a huge disconnect between a lot of the "patience is a market virtue" crowd and the "stuff is too expensive/rare/hard to find" crowd. I'm gonna play the crap out of my characters - it's why I want to IO them. I just don't get IOing some lark, PL'd character to the gills. If you're going to PL a character and play it a ton afterwords, I have no problem with that. But I consider churning out a harem of 50s and trying to IO them all on the spot and then complaining about prices pretty dumb.

I'm not saying everyone complaining about prices does stuff like that, but we have seen it.

My feeling is that the devs have something of a black and white take on some of this stuff. "Oh, that's not what we meant to have happen, we should fix it." Case in point - level 50s earning pretty much double inf for defeated foes nearly 6 years after the fact, because that wasn't what was supposed to be happening.

I wouldn't be real shocked if this was something like that. It's not about how broken. It's that it's not what they meant it to be doing.

And yes, I expect the other IOs to change... someday.

Another source of non-positional psi is the Council Vampyr LTs. If you happen to be fighting the 5th Column, they have minions that use it.

Basically, yes. They created a system that, in total, creates a mix of apathy and flexibility that makes some degree of hoarding attractive. Some of us in here may be making irrational use of that system, but some of us are making practical use of it too, under the prevailing circumstances. That doesn't mean the circumstances are ideal for keeping supply up.

Of the people I know well enough to know what they do with their merits, about half keep several hundred merits on hand, often on multiple characters. It's something you can turn into basically anything on demand. If you actually want inf, you just have to buy the right thing and sell it. Personally, I like to keep several types of wealth on hand - I store inf, recipes/enhancements and merits. When I want to buy something, I get to choose the method of payment that makes the most sense at the time. I don't store every merit I get - I set a "reserve", and once I meet it I start rolling randoms again... usually.

I know a couple of people who keep thousands of merits on hand, and one who had multiple 50s at or near the merit cap. When he hit the cap, he liquidated it all and threw a big event with about 10B in total worth of prizes. He's getting there again.

Edit: my example person with multiple near-cap characters is the same one as Nord.

Everyone who's buying crafted level 50 enhancements. We can't generalize any given item's buyer's market to the whole of the people you need to target. We don't know if that represents a decent fraction of the people playing 50s. What about the people that craft their own? The people that don't slot generics? The people that don't slot level 50s?

I understand that. I'm saying that the level 47+s you see doing that particular thing may not be anything like most of the level 47+s out there churning new inf into the economy. The solution has to target enough of them to have an effect on that whole production base.

All I'm saying is that if you target only rich-blooded players, I think you risk missing out on a big part of the money-generating and possibly money-hoarding part of the player base. And if that big part is too big, the measure won't do what you want it to.

Careful. "They" in this case can't be generalized to the whole population, or they'd all be throwing 1M at it much more of the time. 1M is what someone or some select subset of the population pays. The rest of them turn into the 4000 bids you see pop up for the item, waiting for someone to list the item for the "practically free" prices they're used to.

The people who are paying an extra 200k for generic IOs are the people who are either already super rich or super confident they can replace that cash in no time flat. If this sort of thing is based on getting super rich people to throw away a pittance of their net wealth (or net wealth potenial), I don't think it's going to remove much total money.