Fulmens

First set SOLD to Ukaserex.

Couple other things:

* 33 is the highest you can go and get your bonuses when exemped to 30, which people used to care about for Siren's Call PVP. [32 is the highest you can go and still get your bonuses when exemped to 29 by Ouro.]

* 33 is also a level that you used to get from Quick Katies, so it became the de facto "medium level". People sold stuff at 33 because people bought stuff at 33 because etc. This isn't really true anymore either.

* So anyway, I have three or so characters level locked at 33 and one of 'em hasn't even done a full set of 10 tips yet, never mind Who Will Die. I have H/V Merit generating capacity. The 30x30 was pretty darn popular but I'm temporarily out of those merits.

I'm going to be selling (later in the week) a set, maybe two sets, of 30 level 33 rare recipes. Same as the 30x30 thread: I roll six hero merits over 2-3 days and whatever I get, you get.

600 million inf or best offer.

I have one of these, crafted, for sale, 2.2 billion. Send tell to @Boltcutter if interested.

... and buying Hero Merits with Reward Merits + inf is a perfect solution. You can either buy something with [say] "100 RMs plus 40 million inf" or "200 RMs" [roughly] so if you don't have the inf you have another option.

Even if 90% of the population DOES have 10% of the inf, that's not going to block them from converting to HMs. 100 trillion (estimated inf), 10% of that is 10 trillion, 90% of the population is (very generously) 100,000 people, so the 90% have an average of 100 million inf each.

Pretty much what Hyperstrike said. Making Hero Merits out of reward merits IS an inf destroyer (20 million a shot.) I love it.

My feeling is that HM's are always better. (I'm trying to destroy as much inf as possible, and encourage other people to destroy as much inf as possible, but that isn't, actually, why I'm giving this advice. )

You trade 20 million inf for an extra 2.5 rolls. The market values one random roll at about 15-20 million inf if you're willing to craft. In a perfectly efficient market, which in our case we have not got, the price for thirty random recipes [about 600 million, maybe more if they're a hard-to-get level] and the price of six one-merit recipes [about 450 million] and the price of three two-merit recipes [about 360 million] would be about the same.

So two and a half recipes are worth, say, 30 to 50 million. Well worth the price, I think.

Going through all the IO's, all the levels is probably overkill. MOST of your demand is either at max level or min level (for things like LoTG Defense, or Celerity Stealth). There are a lot of overlooked items- often overlooked by me, in fact. (Someone reminded me about Basilisks the other day...)

Whatever you end up with, be sure to craft it- that 50 M Kinetic Combat recipe is usually a 70-80 M IO once you put 2 million inf and 5 minutes into crafting it.

If random-rolling, I advise doing it at 30,32,33, or 35. Those are traditionally where demand is in the mid-30s and there's not a lot of supply at those levels (because if you're level 50 you can't generate level 33s in bulk.) I don't know how random rolls vs. selecting works out at level 50- randoms are probably worth slightly more on average, because it's more work to craft five things than one, but Random is Random [tm]. I did an entire 30x30 (6 hero merits -> 30 recipes, all level 30) recently and didn't get a single big-ticket item. As I'd sold it for 600 million sight unseen, it was quite embarassing.

I know they stack stuff separately (two 1-billions won't form a single stack anymore, nor will two 2-billions)...

I *think* it's all-or-none . I am *fairly sure* that it won't do a partial and throw the rest out. I believe I've tried to claim 2x1,000,000,000 when I had 950 million on me and nothing happened.

But I don't feel reliable on the topic.

* A lot of the in-game story is contained in the flavor text- the clues, the contact speeches, etc- so if you're not enjoying those, you're going to tend to find things kinda repetitive (especially the older missions.)

* As far as bringing the damage- and having an effect on the team- there are three possible effects I can think of.
1) New kids react slower. If you're on a big team, a fight can be over in eight seconds or less. It might take you three seconds to realize the team is IN a fight and then by the time you click on a badguy, tab to a couple more and fire at one, it's over.
2) Pulling your weight on a big team isn't that much. If you were doing 1/3 of the total damage on an 8 person team, the average other player would be doing 10% of the damage for the team; that is, you could be outdamaging them 3 to 1 and still not feel like you were doing much.
3) If you're level 20, you don't have single-origin enhancements yet and you really MIGHT be doing less damage than any other single player. At level 22, you will get new, expensive [about a million inf for the set] single-origin enhancements and you will feel a lot stompier. One acc, three damage (with SO's) is standard attack slotting; anything more than three damage is basically wasted. (well,5/6 wasted. ) Gut it out. Level 21 is known to my friends as "Level suck" for good and valid reasons.

* When you find a good player, use /friend or /gfriend to keep track of them. /friend lets your CHARACTER keep track of that CHARACTER; /gfriend lets you see the ACCOUNT no matter which character you're on and which character they're on. Players may not accept /gfriend invitations for a lot of reasons, from "Feels stalkerly" to " My list is full of people and if I accept you, I lose someone else" to "Just not that into you." Don't take it personally.

*one thing about Global Channels is, a lot of people in those channels know the game by heart and can't even think like a new kid; I fall into that category more than I'm comfortable with. If you get on a Task Force with all experienced players, they're like commuters. Fast, head down, not reading the flavor text or explaining what to do next. You're a tourist going "This doesn't seem like they're having a lot of fun...and I have no idea where I am or why I'm hitting these guys."

* One good global channel, though it's often quiet, is "N P C" (you need the spaces)- the New Player Channel. Here's the link.

*If you have any questions, send a tell to @Boltcutter - I love to hear myself talk.

And the Total Obliteration award goes to Bramphousian. They got something like four Oblit quads.

I'm a C with occasional dips into D territory.

I'm a big fan, in general, of Sister Psyche's TF. Apparently I can never beat too many Freaks. Lotsa freaks, lotsa XP.

I'd also suggest Hess for a real James Bond style story.

A common problem with these is people who are just there for the final reward, who will skip everything they can, shortcut everything else, and go as fast as possible. Think of them as "commuters" instead of "tourists". This is fine if everyone on the TF is a commuter, or everyone on the TF is a tourist, but when you're a tourist and the people running it are commuters you get dumped out at the end going "Who? Why? What just happened?"

It is exactly "some kind of twisted mini game". A very easy one, if you know the rules; a much harder one if you don't.

This and this should help explain.

Alpha-Six, you have successfully figured out two major things: 1) The "sell price" is usually much higher than the "list price" and 2) you have to list under the other guys (but over "what you'd be happy getting") to actually sell. The kicker is 3) You have to be selling something that actually moves fairly frequently. You can look at the "last 5 dates" for a LOT of things before finding something that sells frequently. Max level [and sometimes min level] sell frequently; multiple-of-5 levels sell frequently, especially level 25 and up; ranged damage, melee damage, healing, resistance, defense are good bets; any kind of mez is a bad bet.

There's a thousand ways (maybe literally) to make inf in the market, and any given person is only covering, like, maybe twenty. I made a bunch of inf at one point buying Super inspirations and reselling them for more. I ran into someone once who made money flipping wing recipes. There are all SORTS of ways to make inf. There's a guide somewhere on "Creating artificial salvage shortages and profiting off them." (I don't do that. I tried artificial shortages three or four times and it's almost the only thing I've ever done that lost me money.)

Start with something like Doctored Wounds, Thunderstrike, or Crushing Impact at level 50- buy for something under half a million, spend half a million crafting, list for 2 million and 1 inf, sell for 2-5 million. Don't do very many at a time. Realize your niche may collapse at any time. Realize you will screw up, lose money, and learn from it. But you'll make WAY more.

I might be able to do something like my 30x30 auction, at another level (33 or 35 or 40) - is there any interest in buying big grab bags of random "hero merit" io's at any particular level?

EDITED MUCH LATER:
Looks like "not." Oh well.

1) It's never just as simple as "a flipper is selling those"- there is an expectation in people's minds, set partially by the last 5, and *everyone* is setting prices (and paying them) based on those expectations. Expectations are also set by legitimate rarity and by demand. (Quality is folded into "Demand", before you ask.)

2) I use the "penny tray" metaphor. Those things in stores- take a penny, leave a penny? People take and leave pennies because they don't care about a penny.Maybe they even leave a nickel. For me "a penny" is about 5000 inf. If I pay a quarter instead of a penny (125,000 inf instead of 5000 inf) i don't really care much. More than a quarter, I start to notice. MAybe. 10 inf is not meaningfully less than 5000 to me. A trip to the vendor to make 5000 more inf? Not worth it. (Go ahead, make a million inf buying salvage for 5 and selling it to the vendor for 250. I'll wait.)

Your first 15 recipes should be in your inbox, space permitting, in about ten minutes
Edit: MUCH better rolls this time. Four big-ticket items in the first 15.

I remember doing an inf exchange for someone with like 100B in inf, before the merged red and bluesides, who I'd never heard of, who didn't post, who was an SG-mate of someone who'd used my services. And he had a few very wealthy friends.

And I seriously doubt those people have gotten poorer.

My example of someone who's really, really rich is PumBumbler, who is a forumgoer but only peripherally visits the Market forum. The guy just likes to play and keeps running up against the 9999 merit limit

FourSpeed's calculation is a good mental tool; we can play with the dials all we like and get highly variable answers, but it's a good tool to get within, say, an order of magnitude. I think there are half as many total players as FourSpeed does, but more of them have broken the 2-billion-inf mark.

We may be getting into a discussion where we have to distinguish between "increase in personal net worth", "increase in personal actual cash" and "increase in inf added to the game." Honestly, between high-efficiency farming, SuperTeams, and CEBR on one side, and mass generating of PVP IO's on the other, I couldn't actually guess whether TopDoc has added inf to the game or subtracted it. I like to think it's come out on the negative side but I have no idea.

Oh, and

And the moral is "don't set up rules unless you want people to use them."

I'm cancelling the second auction and just selling them to MikeRobe.

Bramphousian, MikeRobe, send me a tell and a test email with, like, 1 inf in it. I will use "Reply" to make sure I send your recipes to the right person.

For sniping purposes: bidding closes at 9 PM PST/midnight EST and the minimum amount of inf that constitutes a "larger bid" is 1 million. Not that I'm expecting a lot of sniping.
Next batch of 30x30: bidding closes on Sunday the 22nd. (I'm not real familiar with this, people: should "old bids" still count? )

EDIT: I will assume old bids are still valid unless people bow out.

I'm going to try for the kind of calculation that could be off by a factor of 10, easily. And I'm going to do it several different ways and see if they're anywhere near each other.

TL;DR I think there's about 100 trillion inf in game.

1. Let's assume that Topdoc is the average of the "top 0.1%" and that the inf distribution in this game roughly follows this distribution: the bottom 90% have as much total inf as the next 9% has as much total inf as the next 0.9% have as much inf as the top 0.1%. Also we will assume 50,000 players of note [non-VIPs are not "of note" for our purposes because they're inf limited. ]

So the top 0.1% is 50 players, each with 500B cash for 25 trillion inf.
The next 0.9% is 25 trillion inf (averaging 55B cash)
The next 9% is 25 trillion inf (averaging 5.5B cash)
The next 90% is 25 trillion inf (averaging 550M cash)
TOTAL: 100 trillion inf.

2. The "most expensive IO in the game": TopDoc caused, temporarily, a crash in the price of Glad Armor uniques to the point that some recipes are selling for less than 2 billion inf. Now there may have been some others who followed his lead in selling off before the Great Revaluing but that means something. I'm not sure WHAT but something. He put a 20 billion inf dent in demand and that moved the market. There are, say, three "really big" PVP IO's and he moved two of 'em. Unsupported assumption #1: There is 10 times as much inf "out there" as people are willing to actually spend on big builds. Unsupported assumption #2: there is a market for 100 Glad Armors at about 2 billion each (1.8 to 2.2, say.) Unsupported assumption #3: There is therefore a market for 100 "top end builds" at (#4) about 7 billion each. Unsupported assumption #5: The people who can afford top end builds have half the inf in the game.
So we get 7 billion (#4) * 100 (#3) * 10 (#1) * 2 ( #5) = 14 trillion inf.

That's really low, considering that there was 3 trillion inf when issue 9 hit and PEOPLE HAD NO USE FOR IT. Therefore some of my guesses are wrong and this is no good.

3. The high-end build was 300 million when I9 went live- that's 0.01% of the total inf in the game. So if a high-end build is now 7 billion and the same ratio holds: there's 70 trillion inf in game. There may be more inf now, because there were VERY sharp peaks in income at the time; people had no reason to accumulate more than a few million inf in I8, except for badges. It could be 100 trillion.

4. This one's almost circular logic and I don't like it. It's fairly easy to get a group of marketeers [or even one!] together to burn 100 billion inf for no reason. These forums have maybe 10% of the players, so the market forum has 10% of the money. People burn inf because they don't need it, and so it's a plausible guess that 1% of the inf "marketeers" make, they burn in big public shows*. So a 100 billion-inf show is 0.1% of the total inf by definition: 100 trillion inf total.

* this is "As a group"- I may burn 95%, but I'm saying there are 18 people as rich as me who burn nothing.

I'm going to stop because I think I'm starting to aim for a number instead of just starting with a blank sheet of paper and seeing what I get.

Ok, there's going to be ANOTHER batch of 30x30 coming very soon after this one. Before people get overly crazy with the bidding.

Sold.