Another_Fan

Its Monday, the marketeers must be congratulating themselves on their moral/intelectual superiority.

I tried to learn how to knit, couldnt do it. Just didnt have the aptitude.

Its pretty much the same way you can't seem to grasp not everybody is the same or has the same talents or aptitudes.

Very close but to go back to the yacht club, If we asked them how hard is it to tack a J-class into the wind, they would say incredibly easy.*







*They have their crews do it.

If you asked me how hard it was to build a digital signal processor, I would say its not that hard. YMMV.

P.S. What you can't solve simple discrete difference equations in your head ? what a lazy uncaring unruly and stupid person you must be.

Hmmmm I wonder if 20K qualifies.

And to be nice the conclusion was the best use of merits was to buy things you can't get with inf.

First most of the people at the yacht club haven't inherited money. At any given time most of the people in this country that would be called wealthy have actually built their fortunes.

The point was that if you go to a room/place/forum where people are good at doing something you get a somewhat skewed answer about how hard it is to do that.

Imagine going to the AMA and asking is it really that hard to get prescription drugs ? You'd get the answer "NO and we wish the drug reps would try to focus on their more useful products when they keep shoving them in our faces"

You see its not that 90 Hours its that 5 minutes to check and do things wisely that's the killer.

The card counting system ? You'd be better off letting everyone know, That was Dr. Thorps strategy he became quite the celebrity for awhile , has a best selling book (Beat the dealer) and operates a hedgefund these days.

It will give them an idea of just how badly they can do.

And you are wrong about the no matter how many times but that is a matter far beyond just casual observation and would require effort to record and analyze the results, and is something that if you have many merits you might want to take the trouble to do.

Or you could just take the word of people that profit from your mistakes. Why not ?

Ah heck I am feeling charitable.

Just so you might understand in real life many people come up with systems for all kinds of things. Before Edward Thorpe people with systems for blackjack were the bread and butter of casinos. People with systems for baccarat, slot machines, craps, roulette still by and large are (Roulette can be beatable but the only way to check is against the wheel you will be playing against and you have to hope the casino doesnt re-balance daily). Anyway if you have a system for casino games, the stock market, or rolling merits it behooves you to check it.

Geez sit on cactus before you wrote that ?

I do thank you though, seeing as you have just refuted my "logic" with an appeal to popularity one of the great fallacious arguments. Do you feel the people that you are appealing to are that stupid, or do you just have complete contempt for them ?

You are correct though I am not just cynical, I am completely cynical. Which is why I can thank you for a small chuckle late at night.

Interesting.

Skimmed this earlier.

Just as a note and a caveat emptor to anyone reading. Seeing as it can take a fair chunk of time to accumulate the merits, anyone contemplating the random roll might want to go over to test take the few minutes to roll randomly and see how what they get plays out. And do that several times.

The weighting has made certain that more useful recipes are more likely to drop but it has also increased their supply greatly.

Would anyone like a positrons proc ?

And please all that matters is the recipe price. If you want to compete in the crafted market its much easier and efficient to just start bidding for the recipes of people that were unable for whatever reason to craft. Craft them yourself and list them at a healthy markup for yourself and a healthy discount to where the current 5 are. That way you can at least understand what is going on, and not get fleeced by people who have made a study of it.

I believe you are referring to a different argument and I am pretty certain the people who were wrong are still sensitive about it. It isn't surprising you are exploiting volatility and then go around promoting a strategy that promotes volatility and conveniently overlook the downside.

Its a real shame, merits have some big flaws they might have been able to be fixed or at least gotten some work arounds before I13 if there was a more unified player response.

Well I know an accountant that made a very successful business out of inheriting money but I doubt his model is very common.*

just for ref

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/01/...herited-money/

Admittedly its the WSJ so he is just a mouthpiece for da man.

*Legitimately, Honestly but still intensely slimey


Edit just as a note: I didn't realize the analogy I was using could be charged, if you would like another.

Its like going to the Algonquin roundtable and asking if its that hard to be witty.

There were some people vehemently against having merits traded that later went on to do a 180 on this. Funny to watch I still don't know whether to credit chutzpah or Altzheimers. One of them did a giant spreadsheet which is still online purportedly showing it was advantageous to take the random roll. The funny thing was if you bought the lotg @ lvl 25 that you came out 2k ahead of the unweighted random roll.

Not going to comment on the particulars

But If you walked in to the new york yacht club and asked is it really that hard to make a buck what would you expect the answer to be ?

Many someones as a particular someone, who remembers that well. The original random roll was worth slightly less on average by a factor of a couple thousand inf/merit. So you were in effect paying the house to take a random roll.


That number was considering only pool C recipes. Someone else pointed out that direct purchase and craft of rare pool A/B recipes that were not in the gold roll pool could yield even more profit.

The optimum situation would have to have merits traded on wentworths. I have to say it was funny as all heck to see the same people who had vapor locked to the developers posteriors saying that this wasn't needed prior to I13 do a 180 when the problems with merits raised their ugly heads. Then again they probably had hoped to reap large profits buying recipes from people who couldnt properly value them, the lack of supply and narrowing of the price ranges must have been a nasty surprise.

No that is explicitly what I am not doing. To say that endurance is the constraint to leveling speed translates into saying the rate at which endurance is generated is the least upper bound on leveling speed. This means that of all the limits you can place on leveling speed the rate of endurance recovery is the smallest.

If this were indeed the case, obtaining recovery IOs, or endurance generating powers would cause your leveling speed to increase proportionately.

Now anyway back to your challenge another way to do it so it is not so muddled is to take a range of values and translate that into a number of plus 2 bosses killed in a given amount of time.

So in the case I just looked of going to 48-49 the question becomes can you kill 163 or more +2 bosses in less than 2 hours 24 minutes.

This can be easily tested by building an AE mission with all bosses and checking the time it took for a given build.

Edit: And beating the challenge would only prove that the original statement was ill formed.

Let me put it like this. The maximal rotational velocity an axle can achieve before disintegrating because its tensile strength is exceeded is a limiting a constraint on the speed of a conventional automobile. I am certain that this is both so and not particularly meaningful. Other factors provide much tighter constraints than that one. If I were to make a challenge to exceed that, I would either have people making hover cars, cars without axles or other such things, or they wouldnt be able to beat it. Their inability to surpass the challenge doesn't mean that the max rotational speed of the axle is meaningful just that it was a number that was too large for them to exceed.

A better test to see if endurance is indeed the limiting factor would be to see how fast someone can level with a tray of blues and their normal build vs how fast they level with no blues and their normal build. 20 large blues would provide an extra 1.66~ end/sec over the course of 20 minutes. If you really wanted to be thourough try the same thing over the course of 10 minutes see how much xp is gained.

If end is the constraint you should see significant improvement from the null case to the large blue/30 sec case. If not it isn't.

In your chart the time to go from 48-49 is 2.39 hours
That is 3912300 xp or roughly 170 +2 bosses which equates to a dps of a little less than 55 hp/sec

The scrapper forum has builds that can sustain dps of several times that indefinitely.

Not to pull a "But everyone I know voted for McGovern" but just about everyone I know has a fire/kin. Its a nice combination for a controller and can be built to kill things quickly which is something people seem to enjoy.

Why do people rubberneck for traffic accidents ?

When I saw the title I really hoped there would be something to it. Unfortunately there wasnt.

But just to try and be helpful.

1. Fun is usually associated with doing something in the game well. If your build does things poorly, can't survive, can't solo, and is not very useful on a team it probably won't be fun. It won't be fun for you and people will not want it around because it will decrease their fun.

2. Mids is remarkably useful. Its not perfect but it is very very good, and I for one am very grateful I don't have to do the work to recreate it or try and do the same thing with a spreadsheet or other such tool

3. Like it or not it is a numbers game. If the numbers weren't available and you couldn't use them to plan your builds you would be much more upset than you are now. You would find yourself complaining on the boards "JUST WHAT THE HECK IS EXTREME DAMAGE", "What is superior for an enhancement ?" etc. You have the numbers they tell you what the theoretical performance of your build is. If you don't want to look at them and are upset other people do, that seems like a personal issue.

4. The reason people suggest builds when can be for a variety of reasons, the most likely reason is they had fun with it and think others might as well. Just a heads up most people use the builds they see on the boards as starting points or to take ideas for their own builds. They may like what someone has done with one power and IO set and what another has done with a different power and IO set or they may say wow I can build for that with this character ?