Enyalios

I thought I was the only lunatic going for a full set.....guess not. But I'm probably the only lunatic who is doing it who also has 200M prestige from inf conversions on the same collector toon!

My list of needs is probably similar to other people's here. I'd suggest either dumping them all for 1 inf on market (some things are listed with 40M bids on them for a single piece). Or alternately listing them here and seeing what happens in auction between people. I know I have 2.6B in bids on base salvage tied up on my main just to finish the collection so you know thats quite a lot of inf.

Let me guess nobody else has the fa'lak and ry'lehs at 20 right?

I think they just need to take a 0 off everything. Prices, Inf held, Prestige, etc like its the mid-80's crucero or something. Then effectively the cap would be 20B in current money. Of course it'd be lame to get 1 inf when you used to get 10 from a mob but thats life and its better than any alternative I've seen so far. Heck it'd only take like 6-7 toons to store all my inf then.

Honestly the safest way to store inf is to make alts you don't play and mail them 2 mails with 999,999,999 each in them. Go kill a hellion to reach inf cap and log out till you want the inf.

The best way is probably to put out long bids on like stacks of 4 of some IO which sells over the cap (2.5B?) for like 500m each. Then even if they drop 75% in price you won't get dumped on at a loss. And hey, you might even make a buy and get a stupid profit!

Whats to post?.....should I describe how I'm just now unloading a bunch of -res procs (forget set name...only drops level 10-20 though) at a mark-up of 100000% which I bought when GR was new?

The truth is with so many meta-currencies and such that there is no joy in the market anymore. I still do it mainly to just do it. I don't need the inf honestly. I will say it seems like most craft-and-sell niches are seeing massive supply right now which is driving down prices. For example: I have one niche which used to have 10 crafted IOs and 30 recipes available and price per IO of about 50M (recipe wavered between 15 and 30M). Now there are 198 IOs and 75 recipes outstanding. The recipes have dropped to 2M and the IOs are selling at 14-22M. Is there still profit? Yes. But, along with the lack of drop in purple prices its a sign that even the casual player has slotted most of the toons they want with decent IO sets now and mostly only has the VR/PvP stuff to shoot for.

Is there something to profit from there? I don't know but I'm sure there is.

Yet another pseudo currency since the devs can't balance the supply of inf and have set the supply of high-end items well below aggregate demand. I'm hoping its an inf + merits sink as well but it'll probably just make amerits obsolete is my guess.

I REALLY hope that no amount of astral merits will be able to buy VR/PvP recipes but I am not sanguine about the developers ability to see the differences between the astrals and empyreans as far as limits go.

Since I've paid 400m + 4
Rares a couple of times and it does take some time to pop the 4 rares I guess I'd say the following:

Very Rare: 500m

Rare: 75m

Uncommon: 20m (but I'd never buy it even at that price)

Common: 10m (might buy it at that price sometimes)

Threads: 500k per

Astral Merits: 2m

Empyrean merits: 10-12m

There are many forms of marketeering. Some are a benefit to just the marketeer. Some are a benefit to everyone (marketeer and consumers). Some are mostly a benefit to consumers.

I can assure you that due to the high volume of level 50 play recently that a whole lot of niches collapsed.

Some marketeers just let their niches go fallow and figured they'd come back later. In these cases the recipes usually tanked to no bids and thus like 1-5k to buy one. The fully-crafted IOs on the other hand often went up in price as their supply dropped. For people who only buy the IOs the loss of their marketeer was a net loss (despite the fact that the marketeer was making a profit before and still could be). Also damaged were the people selling recipes as they were now making only a pittance for something of value. The only people benefitting were those who buy recipes and craft them for their own use.

Other marketeers continued on and provided a floor for recipe price. In these cases recipe prices dropped some but not to 0 bids.......so recipe sellers got less but something more than vendoring for their trouble of popping the recipes. IO prices usually stayed about the same or dropped in relation to how much the recipes dropped. Everyone saw some gains here for the most part though probably the marketeer the least.

Finally, other marketeers saw a drop in price and decided to buy recipes AND fully crafted IOs below a certain point. In these cases a hard floor was made on the recipes and IOs which provided a profit point to sellers of the dropped recipes and guaranteed the marketeers a certain profit. The guaranteed profits came with a time commitment cost and some risk as they had to be willing to take significant stock on board to keep prices stabilized while very few buyers and many sellers were in the market. I can assure you I did this with one niche and even on a high-end level 50 drop it was hard to keep things stable as 2-3x normal supply coarsed in....and 1/3rd to 1/2 normal buying demand went out. I went from having about 20 of the IO in base on stock to about 300 in 2 weeks. Of course my average cost to craft went from 65M/ to 31M/ over the same time. For a while selling prices dropped to 40M so I was taking some risk...but now they have re-risen to 75M. I could raise the price even more now since I control about 85% of current stock available if I wanted (the 2 days I forgot to list any prices spiked to 100M+ briefly) but I won't cause its bad for business to encourage others back into this niche.

Does the final way mostly benefit marketeers? I don't know.......if I'd done nothing, prices on the recipe would have tanked and encouraged people to vendor or delete this usually very valuable recipe. Will I make a whole lot of inf? (my estimates are I'll make about 6.6B in post-market fee profits over the next 2 mos from this play) Sure....but I'm also providing a stabilizing mechanism to the market in return in a way that JP Morgan used to before there was a federal reserve. Additionally I've provided about 6B in profits to those who popped the recipes in the first place (my suppliers) AND allowed a lot of players to have access to a nice IO at minimal work.

The fact that prices spiked when I didn't list my stuff shows me that I am providing a useful service even if I am being compensated well for it. Show me how keeping prices lower by crafting is bad. I'm waiting.

I used to do BAF with 6 teams of 4 with 1 team per door. People hated it for some reason though.

Honestly I'm not sure there is such a thing as hardcore on this game. Everything is designed to be casual friendly and all. Hardcore is camping the same mob with a team of 20-people over and over for weeks on a MUD (text-based pre-MMO) for like 2-3 hrs a night just to get a @#! typh tooth to make the best custom item in the game for your main. Then realizing that you had to do it 19 more times for everyone else who helped and helped. Thank god I was in grad school back then.

Honestly about the most hardcore thing i've seen on this game is badging or destroying billions getting a VG to #1 on a server. IO'ing out a toon...even with PvPIOs and purples isn't that hard if you're willing to take 4 weeks to do a toon rather than overnight.

If you're complaining about level 25-40 salvage...well its kind of highish at the moment. But you know why? Cause everyone is playing 50+ toons at the moment. If you want to craft stuff not made with level 50 salvage you'll have to either make inf, make tickets and convert to salvage, or directly pop that salvage with a level 25-40 toon.

Its not that complicated. One person's high prices are another's opportunity. Not that much "flipping" is being done...this is a legitimate shortage of mid-level salvage. Help out Fulmens and go pop some if you think its an issue.

The way to make inf on the market isn't by flipping salvage anyhows. Its by crafting recipes into IOs and selling the IOs. Anyone who is a serious marketeer knows this.

I'm skeptical that there is no individual effort component in what table you get drops from. The devs wording could have meant that there were tiers once you got past getting the bogey prize or could have meant totally random past the bogey prize.

I've seen patterns in drop rates which I can't ascribe to being completely random. I work in the financial field and use advanced statistics to analyze patterns in markets and figure out when something is deviant enough that even with a small sample size its not "random noise" but instead very likely a pattern of some sort.

I can assure you there appears to be a pattern, but its not what people think it is. Damage, touches, and stuff all may correlate with what I think the real participation metric is. But, I don't think they are in the algorithm directly at all. Something has to be making the MMs all get commons/10 shards anyhows.....if it was all 10 shards or random then they wouldn't get commons either. The only non-common/shard reward my mm has ever gotten was the BAF I went petless and pretended I was an extra-squishy corruptor.

Even if the devs think the code works one way....its quite possible it works another given the swisscheese the code must be after seven years.

I can assure you there is more liquid inf in the game than 56B because I have well more than that liquid on toons myself. Not quite 2x but a lot more than that. They dropped some zeroes.

Compare it to the other pile of 50B I also have and start working on a 3rd one more aggressively for a better sample size in 50B comparisons?

Seriously I am starting to run out of ideas myself. Let me know what you're doing maybe I'll do it too.

I've already given about 6B so far away to people who were in my groups for BAF or Lambda and all they needed to make the T3 or T4 was inf. I didnt require screenshots or whatever and didn't announce this openly but as people complained just offered them the inf. I'm sure my groups will now be flooded with people who are looking for the inf and thats ok too within reason.

The current set-up is designed to be an inf sink for sure. But I don't want to be the only one drained of some inf so I won't give my entire fortune away to help people.

It is NOT purely random. I'm thinking of collecting data through an experiment to reverse engineer their reward algorithm. But I assure you it is not purely or even significantly random.

"Participation" definitely is counted and damage dealt is a significant part of it.

My brute, who is a beast on taking and dishing damage, has run 101 trials and received 1 Very Rare, 49 Rares, 48 Uncommon, 2 Common, and 1 dud table (lambda, I was dead a lot, and I took a phone call).

My bane who dishes single target damage and debuffs has done 11 trials and received 1 rare, 5 uncommons, 5 commons

My tanker who actually pulls and tanks the AVs has done 15 trials and received 1 Very Rare, 5 uncommons, 9 commons

My debuffer who is equally useful to the team but dishes less direct damage has done 24 trials and received 8 uncommons, 16 commons.

My sonic buffer/debuffer who is VERY VERY useful has done 11 trials and received 3 uncommon, 7 common, 1 dud (and I didn't even slack that time ).

My blaster who is tier 4 musculature in alpha has done 3 runs and received........3 rares!

Don't tell me its random or fair as designed. I am not good as a blaster compared to how well I play my melee toons and even my buff/debuffers and yet I am apparently likely to receive a rare if I blast. I can do a more thorough experiment where I "control" my damage and see how it works too...but it seems to me atm that AoE damage uber alles is what determines who gets the VR and R stuff.

There is an even bigger problem that this that I've noticed though and which I'm quite sure is WAD. It seems to me that toons which deal quite a lot more devastation upon the enemy get to have a greater chance to roll on the higher tables (very rare and rare instead of uncommon, common, or dud) as well. I haven't finished getting a fully representative sample but I do know this, my brute who is normally placed on the ambush team has done 40 BAF and gotten 1 VR, 11 Rare, 26 Uncommon, and 2 Common. My debuffing controller who always fights the AVs on the other hand has done 15 and gotten 5 uncommons and 10 commons.

The good part of the design above is the one time I was on my MM, died and had to go to get the phone I got the dud (10 threads) pool only....I have no objection to that.

The bad part is my debuffer is clearly going to fall well behind my brute in incarnate slotting for doing what she's supposed to. That is poor design and lame.

I've been on a BAF recently which failed because people have begun to exploit the problem and we had 16 people fighting the adds and 8 fighting the AVs......time ran out before the AVs died.

No this always happens when its been a long time since a new issue was released.

The semi-casual player has gotten their main and perhaps 1-2 other toons to the level shift.....perhaps decided to slot them up and such and has done what he/she planned for i19. That demand is gone and yet many of the remaining people don't need to slot their toons (the hard-core folks who were fully slotted and respec'ed for inate fitness 8 hrs after i19 went live) now yet still pop stuff.

I use these times to build stock for the surge that will come with the next issue.

Purples (which even hard-core folks might not be maxed out on for all their toons at least) are still rising significantly. They've been on a up 5-10% a week rise for 2 months now and havent stopped yet.

I just mail 20M to the person if they actually zoned to cimeroa or rwz or whatever if I over-invite. I don't do it too often though.

Smurphy is who inspired me to set up the inf generating machine I have now. I hope he finds his way back eventually. Heck he's a giant bunny right? He should come back for easter.

I KNOW there are people out there with a lot more inf than I have. I have at this time about 75B in liquid inf, another 20B tied up in bids to make more inf, and about 450B worth in IOs stored in bases across 3 servers (I have a SG and VG base on every server but very few have more than a handful of items in them -- I only build inventory when prices are dropping and I still have yet to fill up Victory and Protector).

People who have the type of inf I have can actually single-handedly cause inflation on high-end items. I slotted 6-8 toons with purples/Kin Combats/Procs at the same time and caused a roughly 15% rise in prices over the time I was doing it despite the fact I never moved my bids. I assume ambient buy-it-nao! demand caused those people to bid over me and I was patient and took a little supply off the market...which was enough to spike prices. When I was done prices on purples dropped back a little before rising again.

I would guess if 3T inf was in the game as of i9 that we're somewhere around 100-150T now. Inf generation has never been easier than it is now and we have level 51 farmers now to generate inf even quicker.

That said, I'm quite sure I'm inf negative over my account as a whole.

I don't know about the 50-50 split inf to pops for sale from farming.....maybe I'm an incompetent farmer or something for inf but my split is probably 20 inf -80 pops. Of course I farm Lib TV on +1 x8 rather than AE on +4 x8. I get purples instead of tickets and less inf per kill to maximize my chances on purples/shards.

I'm glad i20 has some major inf sinks. Not that I don't like having 100M prestige on my main and all. But, its nice to have other things to spend on that actually do something.