COTCaveHater

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For prestige buys I count both mine and theirs. I don't have an up-to-date number but I put in well over a billion of my own.

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Fulmens chipped in 400M to encourage me to convert the same amount of influence to prestige. So, together, we burned 800M influence to create 1.6M Prestige for my sg.

Thanks Fulmens!

[Admin] Attention! In 30 minutes, City of Heroes and City of Villains will go down for daily server maintenance. The

Flopping respec recipes would be a quick way to burn inf. I never knew they were like 50 million each. I have so many vetspecs I never need them (plus, I hate respeccing. I hate the fact that you pick all your powers and then pick all your slots).

Funny, I have a different experience with PvP entirely. I find my adrenalin levels much, much higher in PvP zones than elsewhere. I find PvP enjoyable to the point that it doesn't bother me that 1) I am astoundingly bad at it, and 2) because of point 1 I will generally have nothing at all to show for my time in the PvP zone (except for PvP time badge progress).

So, although I dislike playing my 50s and I dislike exemping because I like XP, I'm quite happy to forgo XP during PvP.

That said, I don't PvP that often because I usually play CoH to chill out, not to rev up.

Do Luck Charms have any broad effect on the game economy? Would buying up all the LC's over an extended period have any knock on effects with respect to price or availability of other items?

Conversely, would flooding the market with cheap LCs over an extended period have any effect?

What about regularly "flopping" LC's? That is, regularly buying up LCs and relisting them at 1 to get rid of standing bids?

Fulmens' inf destruction project has got me thinking about other ways to indulge in macroeconomic chicanery.

Come to think of it, maybe respec recipes would be a bigger lever. If people can't respec, they won't be flooding the market with the IO's they've respecced out. Conversely, flooding the market with cheap respec recipes might have a deflationary effect on crafted IO prices, since it increases supply.
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In other news, anyone wanna buy a lvl 45 recharge IO for 2 billion dollars?

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Tempting, but I'm saving up for that 2B Miracle IO that's out there somewhere!

RagManX

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I've seriously considered buying it these days.

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Hehe, I've still got it listed redside. It's been there a while now, over a year I think.

Here's the original advert:

Every villain knows that there is one thing in life that can't be stolen. It can't be embezzled, and it can't be tricked out of people. It must be earned.

Respect.

Respect comes not from reaching your goal, but from the path you took to get there. Not from what you own, but from how you got it. It comes from destroying what your enemies value most, just to prove you can.

Respect only comes from committing yourself to do, that which others fear to do.

Be the first. Be the only.

Miracle: +Recovery Level 20 recipe for sale.

2 billion infamy.

Is there any way to paint the tape such as to increase the chance of typo bids? e.g. 1,900,002

That would destroy some inf.

BTW I'd love the prestige subsidy - I have four hundred million influence on Justice I have earmarked to convert to prestige.

Trouble is that I'm in Australia and play at non-peak times.

I'm trying to think of a way to destroy inf that involves you buying my M:+R20 that's listed for 2B :-) That toon has 1.75B at the moment (my richest toon). If you buy the item, and I collect it, 1.75B gets deleted through capping, but it has cost you 2B to do that, so its not even 1:1

My global is @Graal

This thread reminds me of a game of M*U*L*E I played once where I managed to get a monopoly on Energy. Problem was, although I could starve out the other players, I couldn't spend my loot when I did so - I had no-one to buy anything from.

Smurphy never offered better than 1:1

ie. you would never get more infl than you gave him infa, nor receive more infa than you gave him infl. A simple way to keep it profitable. His (Influence+Infamy) never decreased through an inf trade.

C'MON! Everyone knows the VRPAAABMGDLEEBDFFBG theme song!

It's so catchy!

I think it is quite probably that I would have cancelled my subscription by now if not for the market. The market isn't the only thing keeping me in the game... but it is a big part.

D'oh, I want to trade in the same direction - I want to sell 300M infamy and buy 300M influence :-(

I want an emote that lets me dive into a pool of money like Scrooge McDuck

Yeah, respecs are a source of extra cheap crafted IOs for the market.

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For an example of a fully functional PVE base:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?k...hAYw&gid=1

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I've fiddled Snow_Globe's spreadsheet and come up with this base which might be a starting point for me.

It comes in at 396M inf, which I suppose is reasonable. I have no idea if it is legal, I'm afraid, as I'm not quite ready to fork out 400M inf yet! I had to give up base rezzing, but IMO that's not a great loss because I think it is hard to have a base rez where you come back with full health. Plus for a pure marketing character they won't be getting defeated anyway.

Only one teleporter, which can go to Steel Canyon or Cap Au Diable for trading plus one other beacon for another zone of your choice. Perhaps a salvage rack would be better than a Personal Storage Vault. That would increase your salvage capacity, and save some prestige/inf.

One thing that would be nice would be to add an Insp collector. These are really handy during the annual Winter Event.

Suggestions from the more knowledgeable would be very appreciated. Also, how do I get around the lack of base item crafting benches?

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I mean come on, is this really reasonable?

Gouging


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Sometimes I would be quite happy to pay 500K for a Spell Scroll. Are you saying you wouldn't like to sell me one for 500K?

When you see this in the last-5 I'd suggest you get some tickets together and cash them in for Spell Scrolls to sell. Or wait until the price settles again and list a stack of 10 for 100K or something to protect the market from Ebilness.

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For every "winner" making billions in the market there is a "loser"... directly or indirectly. And in some cases, the "loser" is all of us.

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This is quite a wrong assertion. It is impossible to have a monopoly in the game, as there are no barriers to entry for production. Any toon can earn any drop. It is impossible to control supply. The best you can do is buy up the existing stock, which causes a temporary spike in prices. With very few exceptions, doing so will cost you inf, not make you inf. Sure, you may have some profitable trades but you'll find yourself stockpiling the item. At some point you become full and cannot hoard any more. At that point you are forced to sell at a massive overall loss.

To anyone that thinks manipulating salvage prices is easy I suggest this: go try it.

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Here's a thought: Do you enjoy the whole inf farmer spam e-mail deluge? Why do these guys exist? Where's all that inf they are selling going? So who gets bothered by what farmers do and who rings up the inf cash register in the end? [Edit add: And this, if I read it right, is what was being touted here: "Despite the exchange rate, make billions in the market to convert to prestige to improve your base."]


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I can tell you now, "Ebil Marketeers" aren't the ones buying inf from inf farmers. They don't need to. I highly doubt inf farmers use price gouging to make their inf, because farming for valuable drops and selling them on the market is a much more profitable activity than trading (and profitable trading requires offline time).

I'll stop now. I'm definitely off-topic.

<QR>

I think we should have a stock standard answer that we all use in reply to market-hating blow-ins. Or even the market-hating regulars, for that matter.

Something short and sweet like 'You're right!'

I reckon that should cut down the complaints pretty quickly. Hard to sustain an argument against people that agree with you. Maybe we can come up with a backronym that describes our real argument.

A couple of weird things about that thread in the base forum:
1) They reckon marketeers get more dev attention than marketeers, yet their forum has 9 stickied threads and ours has... one.
2) They reckon the devs reduced base salvage storage to benefit marketeers (huh? we'd make more money if there was hoarding-inspired shortage!)
3) It looks like if we're sick of being abused here we can go on any other board in this forum and get abused there.

I think part of the problem is that we have quite a few market haters that are regulars in this forum (you smacktards know who you are). They are the real griefers.

Mako's Bite was my niche for a loong time. It is very easy to buy them up at around 100K and re-sell them for millions. Just look for the ones with zero bids (One in the set is unprofitable though - ???/End ? ).

I think the turn around is quite slow so marketeers tend to go on to more profitable stuff. But for the patient, Mako's can deliver very high margins.

Give peace a chance!

I'm a marketeer. An ebil marketeer, even.

However, I think there is a lot the market forum could learn from the base forum and vice versa.

For the last few months, I've been trying to make a solo base to assist in my marketing. Basically, I want a place to store stuff so I don't need to tie up market slots.

Base building is really complicated, even the new system with invention rather than base salvage. I just want to have a few storage bins and a few teleporters but it seems beyond my grasp as I have no idea what badges/crafting tables etc I need. I seem to be always short of something; plot space, control, energy, prestige or badges. Often I can't even work out the name of the thing I want to add the the base.

I've read in this thread quite a few posts about inf being more valuable than prestige. I wonder if this is because builders are constantly amassing prestige in the way marketers amass influence.

To give an example: a couple of days ago I gave a friend 200 million influence. Now, that's more than I would usually gift someone, but losing even 200M is only a minor inconvenience for me - most of my toons have at least 50-100M inf, and I have a couple of "rich" toons that have 500M, and one with 1.5B. And I'm not even very good at ebil marketing because there are many market forumites that make me look like a pauper.

However, Prestige is very valuable to me, because I have barely any. If I could convert, say, 300 or 400M to have the base I want, I'd probably do it. But would I get the base I want for that?

I'm sure (like the market forum) you get a lot of blow ins that ask the same dumb questions that have been answered over and over. Probably (like the market forum) you patiently explain the same stuff over and over again.

I don't know if you get people like we get in the Market Forum, that only seem to come in to sledge the market system. Do you get people coming in here and saying that the base system is total crap? In the market forum we get a bit tetchy with these people and sometimes overreact. I think that is what has happened here.

Fulmens was not sledging base building, or saying that you should be marketing instead of base building, but making a genuine attempt to see if there are any areas of synergy... any knowledge of making inf that might be helpful to base builders... and I am certainly interested in any knowledge that base builders have that would assist me in making inf.

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I didn't say I wanted all the goodies. I don't waste my time. If i get a purp, i sell it or slot it. You don't know how i use my time on the game, so to say i don't put in any effort is, well, ignorant on your part. But who could expect anything more on these forums? Err, the market forums. BUT, i don't run back and forth or sit in WW all day hoping to make a dollar, either.

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For a while, I used to sit at the BM pretty much the whole time I logged in... hours. I didn't make much extra inf. I probably was worse off, not just for the inf and drops I wasn't earning running missions, but also because if you scroll through the market enough, you get bored and start buying rubbish that doesn't sell.

My experience is that crafting is more profitable blueside. Redside, however, the demand for crafted (set IO) enhs is much lower, you can often sell recipes faster and for more than you can sell the crafted equivalent. Seems bizarre, but I think the low redside supply means that most players don't even look at the crafted enhs listings.

By corollary, you can sometimes get crafted enhs very cheap, as I suspect the main supply is players that are respeccing.

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A thing that many people haven't brought up is the fact that characters may be starting over at level 1 if they change sides.

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Not to be mean, but have you actually read the thread?

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It seems to defy common sense somewhat for a crossover toon to start again at level 1. That is no different to starting a new toon with the same name (which can pretty much be done now by adding a full-stop or something to your name).

That said, I now suspect that dual builds were introduced into the game as a precursor to Going Rouge. That could be how they handle EPPs and Patron powers.

As an aside, if the Praetorian Market is in the mirror universe, doesn't that mean it is a place where salvage is sold for a low, stable price, marketeers are poor and casual players are fully purpled out? With goatees?