Another_Fan

I just laugh. It's like going to Kennedy Space Center to hear a talk on "Why powered flight will never happen"

To be completely fair, the fighting pool is practically a requirement for the melee ATs. That is only one pool though. Blasters get told they must have 3 or 4.

Edit: And it used to be everyone had to take fitness.

To be completely honest, it really doesn't seem to be balanced around much of anything.

If anything blasters had their offense lowered with defiance 2.0. People that could play on that life and death edge were well rewarded with defiance 1.0

The whole you can't ramp up blasters damage is a canard. Its a meme being promulgated by people that either have an agenda or just haven't thought things through. Its pretty clever to the idea in circulation.

It goes like this.
1. To be balanced off damage alone blasters would need an absurd amount of damage (insert absurd amount here).
2. This amount of damage would destroy the game
3. So "We cant give them anymore damage"


The problem is of course in going from giving blasters absurd damage, and giving them more.

At the very least the blaster ranged modifier could be increased by 10%-15% and the melee modifier brought up to match. This seems fair since the melee toons don't actually have to use their ranged modifier they just get their melee modifier for ranged attacks.

If you then say that's not enough, well then you can give them some extra survivability to go with it.

At that point you aren't doing silly things to fix the AT, like "Every Blaster a sniper" or changing what people initially enjoy about the AT, or at least what I enjoyed about it, "The sheer joy of being nothing but damage"

Shame, I have already used my laughter pic.

You have to wonder what kind of person thinks, that just because they understand one particular case, they understand all of them and that is all there is to the world ?

Short answer you are wrong.

Extended answer

A flipper finds an item that generally sells for 20 million but people still list at below three.

He buys at 3 million and change
He sells somewhere between 15 and 20.

He has raised the minimum price by at least 12 million and lowered the greatest lower bound of the price by at most 5.



You really need to read the whole post

And I need to proofread more. Either way that was up well before your reply because I had no doubt, if there was a way to misinterpret what I said someone would find it.

In other words "I have kind of a vague impression of what is going on" followed up by

Even someone not paying real close attention sees examples of it happening. You have to wonder how much he would find if actively looked and really understood how it can be done.




Speaking of those moving goalposts, the only difference between what you are trying to define as flipping and "attempting to control supply" is how much you are doing and how focused you are on doing it.

Intent matters because ? ? Even if it did, arguably the intent to profit would trump all others.

Anyway, I have to wonder how you managed to sample the mental state of the community of flippers ? And most people ?

If you want to claim its based on logic and ratiocination that's fine as long as you realize you are deliberately/or by accident overlooking your own premise in this thread "That players don't act as if they are going to be here indefinitely".

So for the general flipper it could be argued.

A flippers motivation would be to maximize profit in a time frame to buy what they need for their builds and then go on to other activities.*

In other words, there is no reason for most people not to practice slash and burn methods in the market and move on when they are done.


If you pump water from an aquifer for irrigation, your goal almost certainly does not involve creating sinkholes, but yet we have all these sinkholes.

Going back to the prior example the flipper wants to make a profit. Either by willful action or wishful thinking they do affect the market so they can make a profit.

Edit:* To be clear I am not saying that this is the case, just that its just as valid as the prior scenario. Its just meant to be illustrative.

I am pretty good about it, obviously not enough to overcome the selective memory that characterizes this forum.


Somethings I keep a corner going on, other things I set the lowest price, somethings I merely tidy up and punish people for selling to low. There is hardly anything I do that doesn't raise the price of what I deal in, or force the buyers to spend time trying to get a better price. As it stands I have many thousands of recipes that aren't on the market simply because they would lower the price.

Let me ask you this, do you really believe that flipping isn't manipulating the market and doesn't raise prices ? Because what you are doing just changes low priced supply into high priced supply with the hope that there are people who are willing to pay a high premium instead of waiting to find your price points and buy at more reasonable rates.

Well that is what it seems he was trying to convey, without examples, without details, and without anything that could be disputed, using words that are at best ambiguous in this context, and drawing conclusions completely without support.

Funny that.


Anyway we have gone from his use of the word "Most" to your "Universal/widespread/continuous/whatever". Its amazing how far the debate shifts from "It's enough to be a problem and have casual players not like the market" to "It doesn't happen all the time"

Well I manipulate things on a daily/continuous but not whatever basis. I am also pretty constant you don't make a trillion+ inf without keeping your nose to the grindstone. So there is at least one example to contradict you.

Well that does explain Arcanavile.

Coming from someone who is an expert on everything and never wrong about anything. I'll take that for what it's worth.

I think I see the point of divergence here.

You are operating on the idea that your secondary/build/set bonuses/team can provide enough mitigation for full size spawns.

Under that case I would have to agree that the best choice would be fire with possible competition from sonic for the extra debuff on teams.


If however you don't have enough mitigation to handle maxed out spawns, other sets than fire can bridge the gap.

Well then allow me to be generous and give you the opportunity to clarify what you meant this statement to mean.

Are you saying that the "casual player" who is not aware of of the price trends for the lucky drop they just got won't see a parade of manipulated histories ? That obscure his available information on how to price his find ?

Are you saying that the "casual player" who is going to buy the IOs they need for their build is going to be able to have the information they need to make both an informed and rational tradeoff about what they should pay for an IO and how much savings they can expect if they are willing to wait ?

Even in things that have ample supply you can easily see examples of people eliminating supply to maintain profitable lines of business. No I wont provide examples because I usually wind up in those businesses myself.

In that case we need to strip mez protection from scrappers and brutes, and switch stalker secondaries with some sort "Utility/ranged" powersets.

I am not entirely but pretty sure it does. They do this stop and turn deal usually when they have gotten a little into the hot feet.

J'accuse ? is your rebuttal ? I can play that game as well.


First who is this "WE" you speak of ? I would be glad to grant you on your say so that you do not. It really doesn't matter to me if that is a true statement or not. There have been more than enough cases over the years where that was the first and primary response.

Oh my oh my.

Can you put a percentage on any of these statements ?

Can you even speak of the number that just didn't bother to deal with the forum again out of disgust ?

I can recall at least a few posts by people saying that
"Yes I understand the market but,"

1. It is too much like work
2. It is not the game I can here to play
3. It isn't particularly enjoyable so I avoid it as much as possible.

What you have is a sampling of people that said "Yes I now like the market". I imagine it's as telling as the number of people that find god at a tent revival, and misplace him next Friday.


From personal experience disagreeing and holding an opinion contrary to the prevailing wisdom constitutes "Looking for a fight"

And there is the entitlement card.

Here you extrapolate from zero to infinity and you assign blame to the blameless.

We've done experiments along this line. Except in the cases of items that have too little availability, manipulation is difficult, if not impossible to sustain. Merging the markets increased global availability and further reduced the ability to manipulate. There is no doubt that manipulation occurs but it is not sustained nor is it a global phenomenon that occurs in every facet of the market. It is an infrequent occurrence that might affect one or 2 items for a short period of time.
[/quote]

I hate to play the doing it wrong card but that is exactly what went on in those experiments.

1st. The definition of manipulation was to raise the price above the equilibrium price. The equilibrium price being defined as the highest price you could raise an item to and still make a profit.

Tautology club anyone ?

2nd If you use the more common definition of raise the price of an item above where it was prior to the attempt and make a profit, that is something I do every day I play the game.

3rd and this goes back to two, just because people who had a prior public position that it wasn't able to be done, tried and failed, doesn't mean it can't be done. It just means they failed.

I don't blame people that frequent this forum of manipulation. I have pointed out where people on this forum have published bad advice, dogmatically defending a system, and creating an atmosphere that has seen rewards veer away from being traded and fungible items. This really hasn't been a great result for anyone.

If I were to blame people on this forum for anything it would be

To paraphrase "Sure lots of people are continuously manipulating the market, but it's unlikely they actually affect most people"

This of course comes from someone who held the position that overlapping price ranges weren't close. Shocker.

bonus for me I get to have predicted this earlier in the thread.

Its also a nice a variant of rule 2.

In this case it's, "It happens but just not to you, don't complain because if you do you are a jerk, and ignorant"

Damage increase doesn't scale well against spawn size. A 25% increase in damage output may take you from an x4 spawn to an x5 spawn (no bosses). 25% improvement to your mitigation numbers (defense, disruption etc) can take you from an x4 spawn to an x8 spawn.

In dark's case you have an enormous amount of mitigation from dark pit, torrent, and life drain.

How did you test ? Any numbers you would be willing to share ?

Really don't want a series of respecs on my "honey do" list.

Let me see. Immobilization is a mez but making things stop attacking and run away is not ?

Interesting.

That is mythical.

Nearly all ATs can attack while mezzed now. IIRC only warshades don't have access to an epic pet. Controllers, Dominators, some corruptors and defenders, have pets in their primary or secondary power sets. The pets are actually more useful than defiance because they pull aggro off their owner. In the case of the buffing ATs they are considerably more useful than the blaster's pets.

Masterminds are of course the ultimate case of mez ? what mez ? Sorry i wasn't here but I see my guys finished the job.

Muon

Fullmens opened his conversation with a post that was a long list of nothing but personal attacks.

Miladys whole argument was I didn't listen to him and change my opinions on his say so.

Arcanavile is well god knows what. Haven't seen him her convincingly refute any of the points I made about the flaws in methodology.


But if you like here are the secrets of not being a jerk on the market forum.

1. If someone is upset about dealing with the market first call them entitled
2. If someone is complainins about manipulation assert that it never happens then go to 1
3. Never take the position there are problems with the market
4. The majority is always right no matter how wrong it is
5. Bonus points if you advocate schemes for making inf that are both time consuming and low profit.

What he calls personal attacks anyone else would call holding your ground and not knuckling under.

Pot meet kettle ?

Goat is right about a one thing. I do hold people in contempt who pick their friends through a mindless willingness to agree with each other. I can have respect for someone who defends their position and shows its superior points, but how can anyone have respect for someone who caves like wet cardboard letting their attitude be adjusted.

Are you the one on the left or the right ?

I win my bet with myself. I knew you couldn't gracefully admit to being wrong.

Even more interesting when you made a positive assertion about a powerset that does exist.

I must have missed have missed the devs changing /fire from actual to hypothetical.