Enyalios

Yes I have an alt I specifically designed to do tips quickly. I play an ITF each night to get 3 tips. The following morning I do those tips (almost always popping 2 more tips doing the 3) and 2 more. Usually we're talking 18-30 mins....unless I get a phone call or something. You want to know something? The alt doesn't have a single set which costs more than 100M for the whole set slotted. I think the coolest things I have slotted are the numina and miracle uniques. You really don't need 2B IOs to do impressive things in this game, it just makes them a little easier.

Which set has more than 1 or 2 enhancers selling over the 2B mark? Do you even research these things in advance? You've been offered significant suggestions more than once on how to acquire the items you desire (of which only a couple are truely over 2B) and continued to ignore them.

When presented with in-game examples you've called on real world examples....when those are presented you've said to stay within the game. I thought you were a genuine person with a genuine concern at one point, but I'm assuming at this point you aren't really.

Given your allies and the fact that you're set on Kin.....I'd go with dark/kin cor or kin/dark defender. Adding the to_hit debuff from dark blast will make the enemy hit much less often and with a brute, a kin, and a rad troller you'll want that more than a little more damage.

They're still the same devs so, yeah. Redside has always been an afterthought except in i6 and i12. Which is too bad because CoV is actually a bit better designed than CoH was as the devs learned from some of their mistakes in CoH (no wasted hazard zones like Boomtown, etc etc).

I remember the electricity manipulation part. I doubt thats what BC was talking about. Anyhows, the problem in California was because you had aspects of the free market (wholesale suppliers could charge whatever) and aspects of price caps/regulation (the energy companies had price caps). So if thats what he was talking about I'm not sure how his example helps his arguement. Just for the record I support fully regulated utilities because there is more value added from economies of scale and non-overlap of universally used services like these than competition can overcome. No state or country has seen consumer prices drop from deregulating utilities yet and I don't suppose they will anytime soon.

E.E.

What you're proposing is to have all recipes (and every other item) in the game available for a set price without a supplier needed.....as if perhaps Statesman runs BM Farm all day and will sell at those prices or something. This would immediately make inf worth a lot more because with the deflation it would cause it would allow people with large piles of inf to put max-builds on more toons. Despite the fact that this would make me have much more purchasing power immediately and going forward, I see 0% chance for the devs agreeing. They have set the drop rates for ultra-rare (check the meaning of that sometime) drops somewhere between 2500 kills and 4000 kills for purples and something equally ridiculous for PvPs (200-400 kills with a 5 min cooldown on each target).

They JUST added a new way to get these items with alignment merits although the purples and PvP IOs are extraordinarily expensive under this new method.

Given that they set the drop rates very high AND recently made an alternate way to get them which is also a significant grind, why do you think they'll suddenly change their minds?

I have seen that logic hasn't convinced you of anything in this thread as of yet. And I'm quite sure you'll continue to believe that marketeers are "stealing" inf from players rather than charging a fee to the BUY IT NAO! crowd for the convenience of knowing that most items will be in stock. But you have to see that the devs have clearly made their intentions to PvP and Purple IO recipes rarity clear.......they want them ultra-rare.

Other MMOs have significantly worse grinds AND require the top gear to do some content. Going forward with incarnates I think CoX will look more like those other games rather than even easier to get the best stuff.

Good Luck with your letter though, all it could do is make me effectively richer.

E.E.

P.S. Enron had nothing to do with manipulating the stock market...excepting the price of own stock which they used to cross-collteralize their off-balance sheet debt which by the very nature of being off-balance sheet increased their share price. If you want to toss around smarmy comments at people using hot-buttons, at least learn about the hot-button words you're tossing around first.

Agreed. We're much more like a Federal Reserve system with market trading than a simple investment bank.

Btw: Do we want to cooperate to make sure we're not invading each other's niches or would that be too oligarchical and collusive for everyone.

I guess we should put all that somewhere out of the forums too like an email list or something.

You're not farming a niche. You're taming it and making it more predictable. Before I was working Oblit procs the high sell prices on the IO were in the range of 70M and the lows were around 250k. Folks who were really patient might do better in this system than under my managed niche, but most players I believe prefer a somewhat predictable sales price not one which varies by a factor of 280. After I took over I initially was selling most of my IOs at 50M.....that lasted all of 2 days and it restabilized at a new equilibrium price of 35M per IO. As you can see as the niche matured it dropped to 20M but input prices dropped as well so I kept playing it and making inf. This isn't a case of "farming" the niche by removing supply. All the supply makes it back to the market. I don't delete some IOs to artificially keep prices high or something.

You're complaining about how scarce resources are distributed. Since you have a nice build already and just want the last 3-5 shinies to go with it I don't get why you don't understand that these items are genuinely scarce. I just paid 2.5B for the +3 def PvP to slot for my main again. I'd actually sold the one I had slotted on her previously because the price was right 2 issues ago (3.5B).

If on the other hand your concern is for the casual player getting purples....well get out there and make some be for sale....the very best way to lower prices.

I think he was suggesting I'm vague. Of course unlike Crazy Kramer screaming about stocks on TV, I'm not going to tell you what I'm making money on exactly. If people knew what I was working exactly they could damage my profits quite alot.

I'll give you a niche I worked for a long time which is currently collapsing though...with exacts as of 12 hrs ago (last time I logged Aeval Morrigan the toon who crafts and most of the sales in it). I may have to go alter some of this now that I've posted it too.......*sigh*


Niche:

Oblit chance for damage proc

Recipe bids x10 @ 5,000,038
Recipe bids x20 @ 7,500,039
Recipe bids x20 @ 10,000,039

IO bids x10 @ 5,555,538
IO bids x20 @ 7,555,539

Outstanding bids x50 on each salvage to make the Oblits

Recipes for sale x13 @ 11,500,101
IOs for sale x22 @ 15,000,101
IOs for sale x3 @ 25,000,101
IO for sale x1 @ 40,000,101

Recently these have been selling for 20M for the most part. The ones listed over that are left-overs on off servers which I use for higher price points at lower margins. When it was selling normally these were costing 7.5M per enhancer to make and selling for 25M on average. I was averaging volume of 20 per day. So even after market fee I was netting 22.5M -7.5M = 15M per....or 300M per day roughly for one niche. About 1 in 100 sales was a typo in my favor as well usually on a scale of x10 (added digits suck but are most common error) so I would have the occasional sale for 175M where someone meant to do 17.5M. This added on average about 1.7M per sale or a little over 10% of total profits.

To make it even more clear to you:

Note that I put multiple tiers of support on the recipe price. Even if someone dumps their share of the niche on me.....I'll probably buy up all their stock and some at bargain prices.

Note that I also support the IO price to prevent people who craft and auto-list for 1 from screwing up my niche.

Note that I tend to list a few enhancers at higher than reasonable going rate on off-servers in my niche for those times when someone decides to corner my market and take the niche from me. I usually make excess profits from their original move (the abnormally high listed ones). Then when they get sick of fighting with me I get extra cheap stuff on the way down from my recipe/IO price supports.

Do you have the inf to do multiple niches like this like I do? Probably not at the moment. But you could run a set like Crushing Impact or Red Fortune or whatever like this to get your feet wet.

Just so you know, this is the most I've revealed of my system so take it for what its worth.

This niche collapsed on me recently but lucky me I'd been expanding anyhows to a new niche and in that one I've been getting IOs crafted for 22M each and selling them for 55M with daily volume of about 15 enhancers.

It really isn't much work once you have the hang of it. This isn't real-life hedge fund management or something.

E.E.

Hey....someone effectively said the '88s were Elite......I like this guy.

Of course from what I've seen dealing regularly in ultra-rares and burning inf for fun are almost mutually exclusive. I make over 600M every single day and I can assure you when I "spec out" a toon even I can't burn inf for fun at the same time.

The system doesn't work to cause enjoyment for the average gamer. It works to maximize width and longevity of subscriptions while also allowing a maximum of new entrants as well. This isn't done to help the players......its done to maximize the profits of the shareholders of NC Soft.

Since your arguement seems to be that running the game with some loot out of reach of avg/casual players even ones who have played for an extended duration, I would like you to give an example of a highly successful MMO which has existed as long as CoX with similar or better retention numbers among its playerbase. I will provide WoW as a counter example of a game even more highly driven by elite loot where much game content is effectively gated if you don't have the good loot....and thus the "fun" is gated as well.

On another note....thanks for showing me how many people read the marketeering forums. I had no idea we could get to 9 pages in a few hours.

Fun and high-end builds don't have a 1 to 1 correlation. Heck my most FUN toon right now is my 36th level Elec/Energy Armor Stalker. She's really fun and her current build cost me less than 500M. Can I make her 5% more powerful for adding another 500M? Yes....but it won't really add to the fun that much so I haven't....despite the fact that I make 600M-1B on the market every single day of the week (unless I didn't log in the day before). If you want the nice shinies you have to do something to get them. Thats how games like this work.

I could handle being the prophet of inf burning. I probably have burned more than anyone else has alone.

I was going to donate 2B to the '88s anyhows and figured I could spring the other 500M for a worthy cause AND I actually wanted one for my main. Eris (the toon) is going to go into i19 ready to be an incarnate and with a fully finished build....well except for the level 53 HO I still need

I wouldn't pay 2.5B for it unless it was going to a good cause....since it is I might as well. Its one of only 2 IOs left to improve my main and namesake with, pre-incarnate.

I don't have 40B liquid atm either. Its expensive to do all my pre-incarnate shoping AND make donations to crazy '88s AND even keep pace with #1 on Freedom solo (takes about 1B every 60 hrs).

One of my niches collapsed too.....I'd been making 400M a day on it and now its recipes have risen enough and enhancers fallen enough that I could only make about 50M a day on it (assuming same volume.....might only get 1/2 since its a "fight for niche" and thus 25M).

Hopefully we're not in the same collapsed niche. Maybe the '88s should have a secret place to post what we're working so we don't crush each others stuff. Of course then maybe we'd actually be ebil.


E.E.

A major key in hedge fund management is to move quicker than anyone else. Apparently I have brought that to even off-market (kind of like OTC in the real world) transactions here.

j/k of course....but it is funny......especially since I was just reading an academic article titled "Speed = Profits" like 2 hrs ago.