FourSpeed

So is a Fire/Time controller.


4

I highly doubt it.

If converters work as expected, prices on the dozen most desirable and expensive
IO's will drop as players create another supply vector for them via convertors.

Prices on a handful of junk IO's, or less valuable IO's in the desirable sets, will
rise as demand and competition for them increase - they're the inputs into
the converter pipeline.

As for the rest? No appreciable change...

Converters cost money.

There's little rational reason to use them except towards the high ticket stuff.

Would you use a convertor on a Thunderstrike, Doctored Wounds, Crushing Impact,
or any of dozens of other decent IO's?

I seriously doubt it.


Regards,
4

That's all fine and well, except for one pesky detail: Twilight's Son.

The future of the Kheldian race is to become Duracells due to Twilight Son's treachery.

Perhaps you and your descendants will become "Elite" Duracells in the interim.



Yeah, I know - buzzkill


I don't have any active Khelds on Freedom, so I'll have to pass on the SG - though
I wish you all the best - GLHF, Happy Hunting!


Cheers,
4

Haven't read the rest of the posts in this thread, and I won't debate validity
one way or another, much.

That said, I just finished running all the DA arcs with my E3 Blaster last night,
(died just once - total), and I can say that the End Drain was not only an important
factor, it was absolutely critical to his success and survival.

There are EB's in every one of those arcs, and in a couple cases, two (together).

In nearly every case (there was one exception, but I don't recall which atm),
I was able to fully drain them and keep them drained while whittling away at
their HP.

Without the Drain, he'd have been pulped into a squishy mess - more times,
than I can count.


Now, if you don't want to make *use* of the drain as a tactic, then, you may
be at a disadvantage. On the other hand, I'm not so sure my Fire/Nrg blaster
would have fared as well - the soft control was extemely significant.


Regards,
4

For the most part, I agree. The "simple" measure I'm considering atm is to lump
items into particular categories (IO's, Commons, Salvage, Purple/PvP, Inspirations,
and probably Procs/Specialty as a separate category of its own).

Then, using a random generator, select X items from each category (IO's get selected
twice - once for crafted and once for recipes, so we'd have different items) to get
about 20-30 or so items total.

Basic weightings would be relative to the number available to select in each category.

Additionally, ensure a few other key items are in there also (a fair bit of commonality
has shown up in the posted suggestions), and there ya go.

Take a month of averages (to establish a base reference), and we're off to the
races.

The "weighting" issues that do bother me (so far) are volume & price... DJIA has
nowhere near the range of price variance we have (it might be more comparable
if they threw some penny stocks in there). In terms of trade volume, I think
all of theirs are roughly comparable, whereas we have many items that trade a
couple per week along with some that are thousands a day.

For instance, a day's trading of 5000 Luck Charms at 25K per equates to a premier IO
(~125M), so, unlike penny stocks, volume can be significant here, I think.

So, for those two things, I might look at scaling/normalization ideas to smooth
those extreme ranges a bit.

In the meantime, we haven't had an indicator in the past, so there's no need to rush.

Additionally, with I-22's release, and 2XP right around the corner, using current
numbers (over the next couple weeks) might give us a pretty skewed reference
from the get-go...

I'd rather let things settle at least a little from release, so the extra time to think
the process through is probably a Good Thing.


Regards,
4

lol

I meant that if they showed up for a tech interview in the company I work for,
we'd spend a lot of time drilling down through testing - bugs in the entertainment
business don't get hundreds of people killed or get your company millions of dollars
in regulatory fines.

That kinda matters....

Here, it's mostly irritating.

Regards,
4

These are good questions.

First, I plan to have both IO's and Recipes (though they may not be on the same item)
represented. Essentially, I'm trying to get some representative items across all
categories (and along those lines I like the Power 10 idea as well).

Your second question is also interesting - First of all, I'm setting myself up potentially
for a bunch of work (all of which is manual) with this idea.

While I do believe its past time we had access to some of these metrics, I'm not
planning to make a career of it So, there's a tradeoff to be decided upon,
which is to get a good representation across market segments while still being
able to manage the data gathering reasonably easily and quickly.

At this moment, I'm tentatively planning to publish three numbers - the Sales
Average (the key one we're talking about here), Production Average (based on
items listed), and finally (for want of a better term), Inflation Index which is basically
the SA/PA ratio which represents how "active influence" is spread across available
supply. Internally (depending on how much work it entails I may keep some
of that data across the various segments, but I've not decided on that yet.

Weighting definitely concerns me and I'm kinda hoping the Mistress of Math (Arcanaville)
will weigh in with some thoughts here.

Obviously pricing has to be normalized. High price items certainly deserve a higher
weighting, because their effect is larger, but I don't want a price change in a
single high ticket item to dominate the entire index. By the same token, large
effects in low price (lower weight) items should still be able to contribute to the
index if those effects are significant (ie. large enough).

Additionally, (sort of in parallel to the Al Silver post), a lot of folks store excess
info on the market in low ball bids, which muddies "demand" somewhat. For that
reason, I'm automatically excluding 51-53 (anything), but it's also something
I want to think carefully about, particularly in the recipe segment choices.

As for volumes/unit time, I don't have the foggiest notion how to get an idea of
that. It's an issue I'm probably going to have to defer for the near term.

For salvage, another idea I want to get a sense of - is relative usage frequency, based on
the idea that some of those will be more representative than pieces which are
infrequently used (also keeping in mind the salvage ranges).

Finally, I'm debating the value of mixing levels within the index itself, or, given a
selection of items, compute Average at both their highest availability level and
their lowest availability level (several things behave differently at L10 than L50).

In short, it's not a trivial undertaking if the goal is to come up with something
useful and representative (as much as reasonably possible, of course) which
is why I posted out here rather than simply pick items I think are representative.


Regards,
4


Edit: @Grouchy - thanks for posting that data - I've pulled the csv file, and will
look it over when I get a chance. My thanks to Archie as well...

This isn't a short-term question... I expect to be able to ask the question next
year and/or the year after etc. (assuming that whole Mayan Doom thing doesn't
happen ) and hopefully, have a year or two of actual history data with which
to help answer it.


Some good suggestions so far, and the intent is to have items across all the
categories. While, like the DJIA, I'd expect short term fluctations to be visible,
I'm far more interested in the long-term trend of the indexes (we're pretty good,
I think, at attributing short-term cause & effect swings when they occur)


Regards,
4

I've debated the quality of their software previously in this thread.

I'm not going to rehash it again here except to say that as much as I look forward
to what they'll add to the game, I cringe equally much wondering what they're
going to break next, due to abysmal (or non-existent) testing procedures.

I-22 fully lives up to my expectations in that regard.

'Nuff said.


Regards,
4