FashionSense

My account is still active but I'm really not playing. Even when I was still active, we had trouble getting enough people on hero side, let alone villain side.

On a low population server, it's really hard to get the 6-8 core people that are willing and able to lead different teams, plus 30-40 more people with roughly the right AT/powerset mix to show up on time and be prepared to run something that may involve dying repeatedly as the first-timers learn the ropes (not that it's complicated, but the number of mistakes required to wipe the entire raid is low). And then of course half of the melees don't have jetpacks and don't have enough knockback/stun protection because they haven't done the 2 minutes of basic research and preparation to tackle something that doesn't resemble the rest of the game very much.....ugh.

I will probably come back and organize a raid at some point, but as a regular activity it requires a "raid community" that we just didn't have.

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I've been doing this since MA launched. Made over 100 million selling common and uncommon salvage.

People still pay me 50k for them when they could get them for 50.

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Sad but true. I've made an awful lot of money listing common salvage for give-away prices, only to find that someone wanted to give me tens of thousands of INF for something that was listed for 5. C'est la vie.

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This statement (and the one you are replying to) are not exactly true.

If you list something for 5, and it sells for 50k, that doesn't mean the buyer "could have gotten it for 5" or "wanted to give you tens of thousands of inf". *If* there were no other bids, then sure - but if there are a hundred or a thousand other bids, even the hypothetical buyer who knew you were going to come along and list it for 5 would still have to consider the fact that there were probably other bids for significantly more than 5, and if he bid 5 he might never get the item.

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Why are you selling it so cheap?

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Do you have the balls to flip it?

In order to run a Hami raid on Pinnacle, you need about 6-7 competent, experienced, and willing team leaders that can organize each component of the strategy and explain it to their team members, most of whom will have no idea what is going on. You cannot recruit these leaders on the fly or on the forums. They must be people you already know and trust. You also need about a week's advance notice, heavy advertising across global channels, and a lot of patience as 50% of the people who show up will not be properly equipped for the unique inconveniences of Hamidon (flying enemies, higher than usual knockback mag, higher than usual stun mag).

On servers like Virtue with regular and frequent raids this is a little easier as you can rely on "the regulars" showing up and pulling their weight because they've all done it 50+ times.

In order to run a Hami raid on Freedom, you need to have been dropped on your head repeatedly as a child.

Other servers are somewhere in between these extremes.

And after all that, the 53 merits are a better choice than the HO. If you want HOs, do the LRSF/STF.

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Maybe we could just give it to the person willing to pay the most.

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I've had just about enough of your communist claptrap, bunny-man.

At least one PvP IO has sold for 1 billion.

280 million for a purple is not surprising.

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However, though...why is there an expectation that casual teaming should yield so-and-so amount of loot for players? Highly-sought after stuff should require more effort.
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If you're so concerned about getting items as efficiently as possible, then start soloing.


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When I want drops, I DO solo. And I get drops. I have plenty of purpled out characters...although less so now that one purple can finance an entire mid-range IO build.

It's not about entitlement. I'm just saying this is an MMO, and MMOs are usually designed to encourage player interaction. Most of the game is set up to encourage teaming, so why is this the exception?

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I don't like the idea that people can solo "padded maps" and get better drop rates - I'm not 100% certain whether that is even true.


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They don't get better drop rates, they just kill more enemies faster and don't have to split the drops with anyone.

A padded map is effectively equivalent to killing larger mobs in a hazard zone. More enemies, no teammates.

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The problem, of course, is that the solo-padders might be the people the devs balanced the drop system around. What would happen to padded mission runners if a multiplier were applied to drops the same way it is to xp? If you set a map for 8, then run it solo, and everything is set to give 2.5x drop probability, has the solo padded runner just gone from getting 8x the rewards as a typical soloist, to 20x the rewards?

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That doesn't happen for the XP multiplier, so it should be easy enough to avoid in the implementation of a drop multiplier.

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Only the devs can pop up the exact numbers but what percentage difference of drops/time do you think the difference makes?


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Team Size - XP multiplier
1 1
2 1.25
3 1.5
4 1.8
5 2
6 2.1
7 2.2
8 2.5

(Info from paragonwiki on the current XP scaling.)

I would assume these numbers were based on some datamining. Although XP and drops may not scale exactly the same as you change the mix of minion/LT/bosses being defeated, they're probably a good first approximation.

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Perhaps the devs determined their preferred drop rate weighted against the average team size not solo play.

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But that doesn't change the flawed incentive...it just makes the drop rate wrong. Assuming the devs determined their preferred rate of XP gain by a similar process, it's odd that they would get drop rates wrong.

QR

It is evident that for an individual person, running solo missions is better for drops than running group missions, unless the group's kill rate is greater than the team size times your solo kill rate. Padded missions just cloud the issue, since they are equivalent to running solo missions at an artificially inflated speed (which is fine as far as I'm concerned, but beside the point).

That's exactly the kind of anti-social incentive that is usually avoided in MMOs in the interest of promoting player interaction, hence the scaling XP multiplier on team size to counteract the similar effect on XP gain. Why there is no similar multiplier on drops is a mystery to me.

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no, the cheapest item in the group of items less then the bid is sold.

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Miladys_Knight is describing the tie-breaking between items with the same sale price, which was originally believed to be "oldest item sells" but after testing seems to be random (or deterministic but dependent on some internal quirks of the market server code that we don't have access to).

I enjoy a reasonable amount of farming.

My solo farm tank is fire/fire/nothing, as my targets are either Storm Palace brutes or RWZ Rikti, both of which have bosses. (I hate needing padders so I generally stay out of missions. In missions I'd just do battle maiden on my arch/mm.) With bosses in the mix, the extra single target attacks in my chain make fireball not worth the 3 power choices.

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The only thing I'd like to see changed is the way drops work for teams versus solo play. I can run a months worth of team play, 1 or 2 TF's per night and get *maybe* 1 or 2 purples.


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I absolutely agree, this is the real "purple problem".

I think the supply needs to increase because the market value, expressed in terms of the time it takes to produce that much raw inf from NPCs, is "too high". But that's entirely a subjective game design issue.

The easiest way to increase the drop rate a little and take away the powerful incentives to solo (or multi-box) farm instead of actually team with people is to scale the drops the way XP scales...if not even more.

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There are no farms

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By using the system as you could you were not cheating. However, you had to realize that tossing in things "just for badges" and setting it up for easy ending (and thus bonus tickets), that you were starting to bend the rules.


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This statement embodies the worst kind of "holier than thou" attitude.

NO, you did not "have to realize" that you were "bending the rules". That is a subjective judgment. You cannot tell people they are lying if they didn't make the same judgment.

So a player doesn't read the forums, adapts their behaviour to what they see literally thousands of other players doing without repercussions, does nothing self-evidently exploitative (like hacking local MA files or flying outside the map), feels they have been treated unfairly, and the response of the community is "good riddance, you dirty cheater"?

For shame.

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After about 48 hours I stopped the scheme.

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Why?

Was it still profitable?

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Because I was bored.

Most days I don't actually bother playing the market, or playing the GAME for that matter.

Also, continuing would have required deleting 100+ salvage, which offends my sense of money management. I'd rather relist them for a lower price that will clear eventually and make me even more profit.

In a bored moment, I decided to take on Smurphy's challenge of making a profit by artificially inflating the price of an item above its Equilibrium Price. I was sure it was possible and know people who have done it, but not in a carefully documented way.

The general approach was that I would buy up the supply of an item and attempt to enforce a higher price by buying up everything that came on the market at low prices. Profit is easy to measure, but the equilibrium price is much more indirect - I believe the simplest indicator that I am selling above the equilibrium price is that I buy significantly more items than I sell and end up with a huge pile of stuff.

I chose hero-side Sapphire as my target, as the supply when I started was pretty low, recent prices were floating in that "less than vendor" to 20k range that salvage tends to hit, and I've seen enough uncommon salvage spikes in the AE mission era to know that the supply is limited.

I started with no Sapphires on hand. There were 91 bids and 92 for sale, last 5: 700, 700, 200, 20001, 20000. The active bids were all for <5k and the lowest ask was 5k. By bidding up to 50k, I got all but 21 of the listed ones. Bids up to 500k took all but the last 13.

I then began listing for 198,000 and posting bids for 50,000. I went through quite a few bid stacks quickly but eventually it settled down. Over the next 20 hours, I left it mostly unattended, so I'm sure there was a fair amount of trading below my sell point after my bids ran out. However, I did manage to sell quite a few.

After 20 hours I was at +2 million (coming back from -9 million to get started), I had about 125 Sapphires, and of the 90 Sapphires listed 75 of them were mine (considering the 13 priced at >500k, that's basically a monopoly). There were very few standing bids around other than mine.

I kept pushing, buying more stacks. I deleted about 50 Sapphires when I ran out of space. For a while there was trading in between my buy and sell points, but it usually dried up and went back into my control.

After about 48 hours I stopped the scheme. The final result was about 150 Sapphires (plus the 50 deleted) and a profit of +6 million purely from manipulation. I took down all my posted items and started relisting at 100k and leaving it for a few days, which eventually cleared and netted me another 10+ million. (I still have 80 or so Sapphires lying around.)

Note that there are things I could have done but didn't:
- I didn't buy from myself on alternate characters to manipulate the history
- I didn't vary my bid/asks to camouflage my position

Overall this was not a particularly efficient use of market slots. Normal flipping would have been much more profitable. However, it was an interesting exercise - I think it shows that if you can find the right target, it IS possible to soak up supply and throw it away to defend an artificially high sell point.

Pinnacle SGs r srs bsns

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<ul type="square">[*] Fight [/list]

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Flight

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5 Merit Rewards

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Huh? Exactly 5 reward merits?

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Gah! What kind of tank wouldn't have taunt??
Sorry off topic.


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In beta when we were messing around with the new Hamidon with Back Alley Brawler in the zone (he tanks Hami real good when he uses GM commands to become invincible), someone noticed that he didn't have taunt...

He replied "well it was either taunt or the purple triangles".

This guide has now been updated to version 2, available at this link.