UberGuy

I'm really not sure what I think of Epic Archetype at level 20 thing. That really seems to needlessly cheapen it in my mind, especially given all the recent changes to make leveling easier.

Unless the crafted item price difference is within the price variation of the recipe, accounting for crafting and salvage costs, I won't pay for the crafted item. I won't pay a markup for the convenience of getting a crafted item when it takes me literally about 2 minutes of in-game time to get the salvage and craft the item.

Given how much time I spend crafting items to sell, that added time is nothing to me. In fact, it's often batched with time I spend crafting things I intend to sell.

Collectively, across my IO'd characters, I have saved, quite literally, hundreds of millions of inf by crafting instead of paying for the crafted item. That means I've outright saved enough money to fund IOing newer characters of their full builds, sans purples. Then the actual profits of the stuff I do sell can go towards the purples.

This means, among other things, that I don't have to flip things on the market, or farm appreciably, to make the money I need to build out characters the way I want.

I've never got a deadline for when I need a build to be "done" other than my own limits of patience.

Edit: Just to be clear, there are big categories of popular/powerful IOs that the crafted price is something like +10M or greater. The gap for purples can be immense; I've seen as high as +100M. People who "buy it nao" at those prices fund the playstyle of people like me.

There really isn't much I've ever said I won't play. I'm fairly tolerant of low damage, graphics other people hate, sounds other people hate, etc.

That said, there are some constraints on what I do play.

• I don't enjoy MMs or Pet-centric Controllers. I don't mind having pets, but I just can't get into having my pets do things for me. I want to play something more "hands on".
• Whatever I play has to be a passable soloist by my subjective standards. Broadly means no buff-centric powersets on "support" ATs, but debuffers are often fine. That pretty much means, for example, no /FF or /Empathy for me.

My one aesthetic barrier to playing something was old-school Spines. Now that there are lots of style options for it (some of which are darn cool looking) I plan to play one at some point.

I'll just answer your edited question, since I don't PvP to speak of myself and couldn't give you good advice on your main question.

The PvP forums would probably be a better place to post this, but lots of Stalker Players are interested in PvP, so you should get an answer here too.

From me, at least, no worries at all. I'd rather you had adds than stop having a host, and I think it's pretty clear this wasn't somehow directly the site admins' faults.

I can't imagine any ad site fessing up to vulnerability to such things ahead of time, and plenty of hosts of all types have turned up hacked via various injection or XSS vulnerabilities. All we can do is keep our eyes open and let folks like you know when weird stuff happens.

This did prompt me to look into hardening my own browser a bit more, which isn't a bad thing.

Yeah. My take on this is that, in a way, the bar has been set too high on these things, too. Given the size of our PvP community, how useful these enhancements can be, and the time limiter put on their drop chance, they're too hard to obtain, and people doing this is a natural result.

That doesn't mean I don't expect the devs to drop some sort of hammer on this. My guess is that the only reason they haven't so far is because they're too focused on GR and any prerequisite Issue release to deliver a patch to address this.

I'm quite certain that if they do drop a hammer on the farming but do nothing else, the prices on basically all the decent PvPOs will slam into the 2B ceiling. Sadly, I also expect them to do just that, and then maybe come back later and revisit the drop rate/mechanism.

I have some small hope for a general rework of PvE-ish things PvP related in the near future, just because there was some mention of this back when Synapse addressed the various "defeat X" badges in the context of things like RV Pillboxes. Maybe the way these things drop might be addressed in that context as well.

I suppose another possibility for "fixing" this is for PvPOs to end up as regular PvE drops. There are a number of PvPOs that are quite desirable even if you don't intend to PvP. The +3% Defense unique, the -DR proc, the whole Targeted AoE set, various low-slot-count KB prot and +HP bonuses, the +heal/+end proc, Ranged Damage procs - all are examples of things that you can't find in existing PvE sets or might want to stack with what does exist. This has to contribute to their high demand.

Really? That's odd, since post 16 contains a nicely worded statement that my claims were BS, not that you said something specific that could be (successfully) disagreed with separate from the OP's thesis.

I've been missed by that power many a time. It's not auto-hit. Believe me, I watch carefully to see if it hits me when I see it ripping along in the air. It's fairly visually distinctive, and it bites when it lands on you.

I think you don't get how the market works to concentrate wealth.

Lets make up a number. Let's say that averaged over all the players in a day that there are 1000 people an hour playing level 50s in active combat, each creating 3M inf/hour. Let's say that all the other people playing the game at all other levels account for as much inf creation as another 250 level 50s. So the equivalent of 1250 level 50s times 3M inf/hour is 3,750,000,000 inf/hour entering the economy.

Now, lets say I am selling something that I can sell for 2M inf. That's actually not much - it'd take an average level 50 40 mins to create that wealth from scratch, so for the price to be that low, let's assume what I'm selling is fairly common (maybe it's rare salvage). I can sell 5 of them a day, meaning I make 10M inf a day. Every four days, I have saved up 40M, which I use to buy something mildly expensive.

Now, above me in the food chain is the guy who's selling me the 40M items. He doesn't get them as fast as I get my 2M inf items, but he sells them for a lot more. He saves up the money he earns on them and periodically buys something that costs 250M. Above him in the food chain is whoever is selling those items, and so on and so on.

Now that example is overly simplistic, because it suggests that the only way to get things for selling on the market is to get them as drops. But it's not - you can use money to invest in purchases that you expect to sell for a profit. The more money you have, the more expensive an item you can invest in and the larger the profit margin you can usually expect.

The money is coming from all the people generating (in my example) 3.75B inf/hour. The market acts as a sort of pyramid system, funneling that wealth from the thousands of characters earning it a few million inf/hour to a few people who are earning billions per day. It's that much smaller population of extremely wealthy players who are throwing the money around you're seeing. Don't make the mistake of assuming that because you see multiple billion-plus inf sales a day that everyone out there is running around with multiple billions of inf. It's a much narrower segment of the market.