Fulmens

Ernham, honcho and Silver Gale: check your inboxes. That's it for me this round, I think.

Maybe it'll show back up in 60 days? Just a thought.

May take me a few days to get to this. Bramphousian, were you cutting in? Or adding EXTRA to the pile? Either way: Well burnt.

Inf mailed.

The "classics" for me, for one alignment merit each, are Kin Combat Dam/Rech and Dam/End, currently around 60 million inf each (near their normal low water marks), and the L21 Performance Shifter Chance for Acc- less supply/less demand/less consistency. If you want to branch out there are things like Basilisks and Eradications, but I don't follow those as much.

Marketeering:

I do more "Buy recipe, craft, sell IO" than anything else and I do that looking for smallish profits (say 8-10 million on a 1-20 million investment) over the short term. There are a LOT of ways to make a lot of inf. I'm going to give you five ideas "for example" that I'd use if I had very little starting inf and wanted to make a couple hundred million. Try to juggle maybe five of a single IO, so if it goes from 10 million each to 500,000 you don't lose TOO much. All are at max level.

1. Devastation Dam/Rech. Basically costs "crafting plus orange", not too high a supply, kind of obscure. Spend around 3M , sell for 10M, give a million to Mr. W, make 6M .

2. Red Fortune End/Rech. I would not STAY in this niche for more than, like, two days but right now there are 7 for sale crafted, the recipe costs basically zero, you can list for 10 million and probably get 12 or 15 million and your other costs are actually less than the Wentfee. Get in, get profit, get out.

3. Gaussian's, To Hit Buff/Rech . I got out of this because it would cost me 8 or 9 million and I'd only sell it for maybe 15, but on the other hand? it's a solid niche you can stay in for weeks. Risky because you're investing a lot for your return.

4. A slightly higher end bet- you could lose real money here- Numina's Heal. Currently about 20 million to buy and craft, sell for 40-ish, give 4 million to Mr. Wentworth and keep the other 16.

5. Steadfast Protection: KB protection at level 30. Costs you half a million to 2 million, craft, sell for 15 million. Kind of a risk, because it usually sells for under 5 million so your market niche may collapse.

So there are five ideas to try, see what works, hopefully make a lot of money and only lose a little.

I'll mail you the inf, Mistress Rue. Enjoy!

Also: Erhnam, what's your global in name?

Rue, Ernham: how much do you have to throw in the pot yourselves? I can match 2:1 for up to, say, the first 250 million (that's 2 of mine to one of yours.)

Maestro: Welcome to the treadmill!

All you guys: you know the standard ways to make a quick 50 or 100 million or 200 million inf, right? (for instance, running 10 tips plus an alignment tip, then "Who Will Die 1" twice back to back, gets you two Alignment Merits. Turn those in for one or two shinies, craft the shiny, sell it on the market. I don't know what the current shinies are. Then buy another AM with the fifty RMs you got for running the tips.)

As far as the L50 PVPIOs, I've always been under the impression that there's a large oversupply of everything but a few, compared to the actual demand. For every "Big 3" you generate, what, 20 cheap ones? I don't know.

There has, recently, been an even bigger supply because people have been able to farm with Freed accounts.

Is it particularly common to see people with a whole bunch of PVP bonuses in their build? I don't remember ever seeing it but I haven't done a lot of looking.

I'm long on inf and short on creativity.

Where should I burn inf and who will burn it with me? Three-four billion in contributions and we can temporarily regain the #2 slot on Virtue.

Or I could try and find some base building newbs.

Or... something.

How fancy do you want to be?

With a Force Field defender, which you may well hate, you can literally make them ten times tougher by [your] level 17:

Four slots in each of the little bubbles, with L20 IOs
Four slots in the big bubble, with L20 IOs
Four slots in Maneuvers, with L20 IO's

(Four L20 IOs = three SO's, roughly).

Pick one of them, set as target, stay within 25' of them and that person will have 45% Defense or very, very close to it. Tell your other friend to stay within 25' of you and HE will have 45% Defense or very, very close to it.

Now they're ten times tougher. I recommend a digital kitchen timer to keep track of the 3-minute "better rebubble" mark.

Think they can stay close?

"With the amount of influence being earned in the game why sell things for over 2 billion,"

... because that's what people are willing to pay. I've bought things from people who were happy to get my price, and sold the same things to people who were happy to pay my price.

I have philosophical reasons why I want people to pay Wentworth fees but if an individual is willing to take the risk to avoid them, that's an option they have.

There used to be a rule against naming for just that reason.

After more thought, and more evidence, I'm pretty sure I was wrong. While there are things that the GM's have put in the "not our problem" category before (like this and, I think, pay-for-PL arrangements) I don't ever remember "cheating people in trades" being specifically mentioned.

In almost all cases [including, as it happens, this one] the only reason for not trading through Wents is to save the 10% fee. This sets up a clear risk/reward ratio: you're risking 50% or 100% of your inf (or stuff) for a 10% savings.

I would add to Zombie Man's list "You may be trading things that are not, in fact, tradable at Wents or through the normal trading mechanism" (level 51++ HO's, maybe? If those get over a billion inf they require multitrades.)

I want to see as much inf as possible go down the Wentworth's rabbit hole. However, that is not my primary reason for coming down on the "GMs are not trade insurance" side of this argument. (I'll take "obscure sentence structure" for 500, Alex...)

1) The more things GM's are responsible for, the higher their workload.
2) If GM's are in charge of enforcing agreements between players, there will be an ever increasing tendency to call in the GM's over ... beef byproducts. Scamming over trades? Call a GM. Scamming over PLs? Call a GM. Getting PL'd by someone incompetent? GM. Someone you were PL'ing got a purple and you think you deserve it because you did all the work? GM. Don't like the hairstyle you got at the tailor? GM. It's gonna be the first response to a tantrum.

I want to be able to get a GM when I have an actual problem, like a bugged Synapse. If all the GM's are busy handling the problems of people acting like 4-year-olds, that becomes MY problem.

I kinda have to stand with the GM's on this one. It's their job to fix problems with the game. Fixing human nature... well, that's a little bit of scope creep, don't you think?

Sorry you got cheated. I've only gotten cheated once and I did something against the Terms of Service. [That sounds more melodramatic and less lame than it actually was.] And I've done quite a lot of trades.

Think of it as a game where you get to trade imaginary money for the chance to show you're actually trustworthy. Or the other way around.

I saw a few low-level rares go up over the last couple months. Consider that supply on these things is pretty low... how many do you get on four sewer runs?

I was the guy who listed 10 Luck Charms at 2 billion each to finish off my "burn 10 billion inf" project, back when we all thought that was a lot of money. Sadly, I got my inf back when they merged the markets and I had to burn it some other way.

Edited to note: "We all" may not include all of us.

By the way, I may have another set of 30 level 30's available fairly soon.

Minotaur:
This may have been fully clarified already, but by "create inf" we mean "Add inf to the game", not "Add inf to your character and subtract it from someone else's".

I expect that the price will be considerably lower in the end, but putting a big number on it, for starters, couldn't hurt.

You do need level-locked characters [or you need to roll at level 30/etc as your characters go by] to get random rolls at that level.

I happen to have a bunch of level -locked characters because I started Midlevel Crisis, an organization devoted to level-locking characters for the exact purpose of generating random rolls at medium levels. . . I also locked a character at level 30 for about a week and a half recently.

I had a bunch of characters who hadn't done ANY "Who Will Die" so I could get 3 or 4 alignment merits on them in, like, one day. Also, most of my characters had at least something- five tips or twenty or thirty reward merits- that I could easily turn into an alignment merit.

If you like doing Sister Psyche, that's 50 reward merits by itself. If you're doing level-locked L35s you can ALWAYS find people doing ITFs.

I recently went to an 800-million-inf minimum on this because I _don't_ have any more untapped resevoirs of hero merits. Well, maybe one or two coming up, but not like the 30 or so undiscovered HMs I had sitting around.

20. Local mails may somehow count against this; I don't remember the details.

If you do decide to destroy the inf, which I sincerely hope you do, I'll match it 1 for 1 up to, say, the first half billion.