Fulmens

Ukaserex: I think the "traditional" reason for power creep was that, say, a pen and paper RPG was putting out a new supplement. Which would have new things in it that were supposed to be cool enough that people would want to play them, so they'd buy the new supplement. Which would tend to make them a little better than the old stuff.

The worst offender may have been RIFTS, but the worst one I ever played personally was Shadowrun.

Ah. I thought you were buying for X, crafting, selling for X+30M or whatever, in which case "X" can float up and down without hurting your profits much.

If you're making a Hero Merit and selling for X+30, it makes a big difference.

As mentioned, there's been a river of merits in the system, so there are a lot of HM's and a lot of supply in general. (I picked up a lot of recipes that normally go for 20 or 30 million, at 5 million apiece. ) Some percentage of those guys roll random; some percentage of those random rolls will land in your niche. What I'm saying is, you may not be competing with just one person, you may be competing part-time with everyone who wants a costume or a black wolf and is ripping into random packs by the dozen.

The good news is, what you're buying for your characters is ALSO cheaper.

Ukaserex's idea about running one HM a day is not a bad one; mine don't take "6 to 10 minutes" but they're not much over 12.

I'd recommend, if you can take a LITTLE tedium, find a couple of things that you can buy 10-packs of and sell in bulk. Buy for 1 million, craft for half a million, sell for 10 million, give a million to Mr. W, make 7.5 million. If you do that on ten copies, you've made almost as much as you get from that Alignment Merit. And wentporting to Steel Canyon costs 10,000 inf and 30 seconds. So... like, 10 minutes after you get in the swing of things.

The prices will float a little; 75 million is probably optimistic for a 20 million investment.

I'm guessing 500M was the lowest bid. May have clicked on something like 180,000,000 ? I don't know what the actual price was.

I make LESS mistakes because I end my sale prices with a nonzero number (so "a billion" is 1,000,000,908) but I still make SOME mistakes.

Go out there and make enough money that you can cry into a pillow stuffed with hundred dollar bills.

Right now is a rough time because of the hundreds of thousands of Reward Merits that are turning into a river of recipes. That river is going to slow down, but I don't know if it is ever going to go away.

I've never gotten into a fight over a niche and stayed with it, so I can't give advice on that. I do believe you should never have only one niche. Don't go crazy like some of us and try to be in every niche in the market, but three is a good number. One dries up, you can find another while still keeping 2/3 of your profit stream.

Half of all needed adjustments will be buffs, on average, half will be nerfs.

Any attempt by customers to forbid the second half should fail.

Edited: After I hit "send" I notice this looked like a disagreement with taanstafl. I agree with him/her/it: Purchased items should not be exempt.

There are plenty of such items with under 10,000 for sale, ThatGuyThere.

My guess, Ranger, is that for most items with 10,000 for sale you will get to a certain point (maybe 6000, maybe 2000) where all the remaining items are considerably more expensive. This is because, at some point many would-be marketeers try making an artificial shortage of common salvage. They keep buying at 250 and selling at 10,000 - buying more and more- until they run out of market slots. There are a few types of salvage with high enough demand, like Alchemical Silver, that you can keep juggling; for the rest, you'll often see two or three thousand abandoned for-sale items. (I've seen someone give up an attempt in realtime; one day there were 3000 bids and the minimum price was 50-odd thousand, the next day there were 1200 bids and the minimum price was 20-odd thousand. The items sold, one or two double-XP weekends later. )

The original point of the Dow Jones index was that it was quick and easy to calculate- just add 70 stock prices and go with it.

I think something "quick and easy to calculate" should be high on the list. Come up with our weighting once, use a sloppy guess if we have to, grab 20 or 25 items and roll with it.

It's still going to be a lot of work, probably, but this isn't brain surgery. If it's too damn sloppy, WHO CARES?

It's a decision the Devs have made... if everyone can get around mez with a set and forget mechanism, there's no point in even having it. I believe the mez protection/ no mez protection divide is much larger than it should be, but that ship sailed in... roughly... 2005. (I think they could have dropped mez protection mag for melee chars when they nerfed all the other defensive powers; they did not.)

I also think KB for NPCs is hideously overpowered and hideously overcommon- if you don't have Acrobatics, KB protection or a KB IO, in the mid to late game expect to spend about... 2/3 of your time flopping around like a fish while the enemies beat you to death at their leisure. And I think the -KB IO (acrobatics-in-a-can) was somewhat of a workaround for that, but it has a lot of the same functionality as a power that's already available to "Anyone." (Yes, I mean "Blasters", I have about twelve, what's your point?)

I don't have any good advice other than "The market is screwy right now."

People have been pouring reward merits into the obvious, and less obvious, things. I'd probably try AM's with 25-29 random rolls but I've been sitting this dance out lately.

Or you could hold onto them for a while- once people have the shiniest Reward Pack items, they'll probably calm down SOMEWHAT.

There are some subtleties to the "Rule of 5"- I'm not going to give specifics because
1) you probably don't need them yet, and
2) I tend to get them wrong.

They gave us a LOT of hints about when I22 was going live...

my guess, a week from today, has nothing behind it but that single redname post I read.

If I remember, what's up with Alch Silver is a bunch of marketeers got together, ran some farms, and choked a few flippers with midlevel magic salvage. That doesn't necessarily make it a BAD indicator- it's still used in midlevel common acc and def- but it might be a bit of an ... unusual case. More than it used to be, even.

I'd tend to skew more towards midlevel than low-level and I might skew towards expensive things.
If I were making a basket from scratch, I would have the following categories:
GENERIC: L20 Defense, L35 generic EndMods, L40 Rech Reduction, L50 Acc, L50 Res Dam
SALVAGE: Deific Weapons, Pangean Soil, Spell Ink, Steel, Carnival of Shadows Mask
UNCOMMON BUT UBIQUITOUS: Crushing Impact Acc/Dam/Rech (50), Karma: KB reduction (Crafted) (30), Doctored Wounds Healing/Recharge [crafted] (50), Regenerative Tissue: Regeneration (30), ["representative cheap thing" like, I don't know, Serendipity: Defense at 40].
MID TO HIGH END: Numina's Healing/Recharge [crafted] (50), Celerity: Stealth (50),
PURPLES AND CURRENCY: Respec Recipe, LoTG: 7.5% (25), Glad Armor 3% Def, Apocalypse Dam/Rech, Fortunata Hypnosis: Sleep Duration.

Weighting is challenging- right now, Apple is like ten times overweighted in the DJIA just because its stock price is so high.

I've got 25 items there. Weighting each category equally seems reasonable- although I might want to split "Purples" and "Currency" because those are where a LOT of inf gets burnt. (Do we sell 10,000 commons at around 200K for every Glad Armor 3%? If we did, Glad Armors would be as much of an inf-destroyer as the entire common IO market.)

Within the category is more challenging: if you just add em up, "Purples and Currency" becomes "Glad Armor and Supporting Cast." There might be some way of measuring by how many are estimated to sell per day at the time we set this up, but that's very challenging for things like Spell Ink. (Luck Charms sold at several hundred a day, back in the Luck Charmer days, and that was before Council dropped them OR you could get them in the AE.)

EDIT: A bunch of people jumped in while I was researching...

... with a big stick?

/e flees

LoTGs may be a good proxy for "The market", 4, because as you've mentioned they are the go-to place for many people to convert RMs and AMs. Almost every build can use them in bulk. They're almost a currency on their own.

I would also suggest that Respec recipes, which have been much less affected by the new ways of buying things*, are also a valid measurement point.

It is not a GREAT move to use those two as a proxy for "the whole market", but that's a move I'm going to do at the moment.

Back when I first tried burning inf in bulk, LoTGs and Respecs were both "about" 70 million. I have notes that say things like "Sold an LoTG, burnt 7.0 million inf." Now, after all the changes in supply and demand: LoTGs were "about" 100 million (before the flood of Super Pack merits, which may or may not dry up) and Respecs were ... 85 to 140 million (with very little stickiness.) What does this tell me? Two things.

1) People seem to be willing to pay about 50% more for these goods. Or they were last month.
2) People may be unwilling to bother flipping respecs (with all the risk that entails) for less than 20 or 30 million inf profit, after Went-fees. This seems weird because, before a month or so ago, I saw a lot of "tightness" in the market- it was getting to be more and more work to make an honest billion crafting and selling midrange items**. And yet the prices weren't moving down much.

* People have more freespecs, I think, with the pay-to-become-a-vet system, but I can't think of any other way to get respec recipes that is "new" with merits. I'm probably overlooking something.

** by "midrange items" I mean things in about the 20-50 million range. Not Hecatombs, not Serendipities.

There's "mathematical" proof, there's "physics" proof, and there's "Beyond a reasonable doubt" proof. Apparently you're holding out for one of the first two categories.

I have a very sparse sampling of expensive items that SUGGESTS prices have gone up by 50% or more on standard high-end items, despite a tremendous increase in supply. (the LoTG has been suggested as an alternative currency for a reason.)

I have a poorly-quantified sampling of relatively cheap items [L30-40 generic EndMods, for instance] that SUGGESTS the common definition of "small change" has gone up by a factor of 5 or more.

I have a history of inf to prestige donation that SUGGESTS there are more people comfortable burning 200 million inf than there used to be people comfortable burning 100 million. (Apologies for the tortured syntax.)

We have at least one case where the supply rate of inf damn near doubled overnight; I'm also sure the rate of new inf to new items in AE farming is far greater than the rate in "real play", and as AE farmers get better the rate keeps getting worse.

And we believe the Devs said, last April, there was 20 times as much inf in the game as there was the day I9 went live. (3 trillion to 56 trillion.) Unless the "Stored on character" ratio went up to colossal levels, inf-actually-spent ratio has gone up by a tremendous amount as well.

So call inflation small, gradual and unprovable if you like. I'm going to suggest the vast weight of evidence is on it being severe and large.

Most of it is probably concentrated on very high-end gear. I think a L30 Regenerative Tissue +Regen is roughly unchanged at 40 million inf, from I9 to the present day, but that used to be one of the most expensive things in the game.

FourSpeed: I'm going to go after one of your assumptions here.

"The observable fact that prices are not fundamentally different than they were " is not observable to me, because "a brief examination of market transactions over time" is not something I can do. I don't have a broad range of market prices for 2009, 2010, and 2011. I don't have a stockticker that goes back four years.

I _do_ have a fair variety of anecdotes, many of which show prices going up and many of which show prices going down. The plural of anecdote is not data, and many of the changes can be attributed to changes in the game. We can discuss the Rise and Fall of the Steadfast -KB; we can discuss the crash of the Luck Charm; but those are stories I can tell without any reference to "prices have gone up" or "prices have gone down."

So what do I have? I can go through a "110 million inf build" for a Blaster I did in around early 2008 and see what it would cost now. I have some notes from 7/2009 on my original inf massacre. I could look at a "40 million inf" build that I did for a Force Field defender in maybe 2008- it was before BoTZ existed- and price it out today. I don't seem to have anything really recent, though.

Would those convince you?

Here's a couple things I pulled out of the original inf massacre( 7/2009):

* I was selling LoTGs, crafted, for 80 million, and respecs for 70-90 million.
* I bought a Hecatomb for 150 million, and sold it for 250 million.
* I sold a gaussian end/red for 40 million. They've bounced around a lot, down to 20 recently, but are "usually" around 60 million.

Respecs have recently sold for 150 million inf- and are available in a couple more ways- and while I'm out of the loTG market they have been up around 100 before the super packs, haven't they? And that's something you can make in four days. Hecatombs, before the announcement of converters, were around 400-600 million inf- and those basically only came from one place. So there's some points on the high end.

On the low end, and this is anecdotal, it seems like people "round up" to 5 or 10 million inf an awful lot, on crafted IO's, these days, and will drop a million on a generic IO or 500K on a spell ink without blinking. Maybe they always did, but some people thought it was worth it to supply that market back then. Now they can't be bothered picking up pennies from the gutter.

Hell, people will spend 10 or 20 million inf on an Ultimate Inspiration. I don't think people would have thrown that kind of money around quite so fast, say, in early 2010.

We will have to wait hours! DAYS!

Maybe I'll get my brute to 47 before she buys the 3% Glad Defense she will slot then...

I was, indeed, making the assumption that farmers are farming inf to spend it on the market and that everyone who sells items for inf in the market will, eventually, spend that inf in the market. I think it's a pretty solid approximation.

The 10-to-1 follows from that: if you introduce a billion into the market, you have to spend 10 billion to destroy it. Therefore a billion inf created means 10 billion of spending. If people spend 10 billion more inf on the same amount of goods, total prices have gone up by 10 billion.

To put it another way: If you add a billion to the game, almost the only way that billion will leave the game is by people spending 10 billion at the market.

Farming outside AE does generate "stuff" to go with the inf. I analyzed this based on some of TopDoc's numbers, back here and got a rough estimate of 1 "new inf" per 8 inf in the pocket of the farmer. Might be 1 in 3, might be 1 in 20.

Farming in AE generates inf almost exclusively, and at a MUCH higher rate (I don't remember where the discussion was, but it convinced me that numbers around 100M/hour are 'reasonable' .)

I am not attempting to destroy more inf than hero-merit conversions. I am not attempting to destroy more inf than astrals. I am not attempting to single-handedly lower prices by dramatic amounts. I'm just trying to do my part, maybe a little more. I may not have cancelled out even one AE farmer, but I'm pretty happy with what I've done.

*settles snug into bed*

I SHOULD be warm, I threw about 5 billion on the fire to make sure it didn't accidentally turn into crafted IO's.

That moves the inf around without getting rid of ANY of it! Well, maybe 10%.

If I had a "SG uniform" constume contest giving away prestige or something...?

An excuse to watch the burn! What server are you on and when do you play, Ehrnam? (I thought I did a copy-paste to avoid name problems) We can set up a time, and I will show up and hand deliver the inf.

Every 88er does it for a different reason, or set of reasons. I don't like doing things that are too easy; I like stuff that either helps the "casual player" or doesn't actively hurt them.

That's why I kept a small buffer of midlevel salvage going for over a year. That's why I wrote a frankenslotting guide. That's why I started Midlevel Crisis and Teenage Wildlife.

That's why I decided to find good ways to destroy inf. Because everyone who farms a billion inf raises prices, in total, by ten billion inf. Everyone who destroys a billion inf lowers prices, in total, by ten billion inf.

Am I lowering prices by more than 1 part in 50,000? I don't know. But there's a good chance that I've directly destroyed more than 0.1% of the inf currently in the game, and counting indirect effects (competition between the Crazy 88s and the people we pass, contributions from base owners, contributions from generous marketeers) maybe I can take credit for 0.2% or more.

Pretty good for 0.002% of the game population.

Texarkana:
"I don't want to be rich, as long as I can live comfortably and have everything I need."

If you're concerned about your economic standing ("How I measure up to others") there may be some inability to make progress.

If you're concerned about acquiring five sets of Kinetic Combat, though, I don't think it's ever been easier.

in totally different news, I typo'd "Texarcana" and now I may have to get the gunfighter costume package.