Fulmens

I'm noticing a big spread opening up between a LOT of raw and crafted IO's. Are marketeers ceasing with the crafting and just running CEBRs instead?

I'm thinking of burning a couple billion inf in another project; I'm looking for up to 3 people to match me, inf for inf.

How's the Blind Trust business, people?

I've goaded a lot of people into doing things but if you add up all the inf I've personally burned, it's not much over 100 billion.

That's right,I did this for like two years and someone pulled up next to me in an HOUR.

ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR THE NEW GUY!

Since a person has to spend an influem 10 times before it fully leaves the game, you have lowered prices, overall, by a TRILLION INF.

Thanks for fighting inflation!

The only niche markets where under-max -level-recipes sell regularly (that I know of) are the Big Three at min level (esp. LoTG). My recent experience suggests that midlevel demand is currently higher than supply, compared to maxlevel, but both are so low that they'd be easy to flood. -

Welcome to the Rogue Isles- keep track of your luggage! There are two parts to the effect you want.

Part one is getting a second costume slot- you can get one at level 20, one at 30, one at 40 and one by turning in special salvage. You can go to a facemaker [I think they're in Port Oakes, it's been a while] and pay some inf to change the costume in any given slot. You can use this to have one "regular clothes" and one "supervillain costume" or one with angel wings and one with leathery wings or whatever you like. I know a guy who has an interview suit for when he meets pickup groups. I know someone else who had the I'm In Debt costume [debt used to be a much much bigger problem in the game.]

Part two is actually changing from one costume to the other. Under the Menu, upper right, you should see a "Costume" option which lets you change between slots.

Edit: Damn, I got distracted for five minutes and everyone jumps in ahead of me.

I've never seen a purple that didn't go for considerably more crafted.

Warning: if you want to sell for X, list at "considerably less than X, plus a little." For instance, if I want something to sell for 50,000,000 I list it at something like 45,000,908. That puts me ahead of the people who want 50,000,000 and list at 50,000,000... or 49,000,000.

And if I do sell at 45,000,909 that's still a good enough price for me.

Minotaur- I'd go for 10%, like market fees, but I might be greedy like that.

You... dastard!

(runs off to see how many of those I had for sale)

Grouchy: Looks like "Crap crap crap SO CLOSE crap Maybe crap crap CLOSE!" I don't have a more exact pricing than that either.

TopDoc: This is true.

I wanted to mention something that "Anyone" can do- any character, with almost no changes to their playstyle. If someone DOES want to change their playstyle, you're the canonical source on acheiving spectacular results with that. Although playing the market is a playstyle change, too.

IronPlankton: I probably should mention that the FIRST time you do 10 tips plus the morality mission, you will get 50 reward merits; every time after that you will get a Hero/Villain merit directly. You can turn 50 reward merits plus 20 million inf into a H/V merit, but you have to have the cash to start with... so you might have to do four days of work to get two H/V merits if you don't have the starting cash.

I will also mention that there's at least one IO out there where you can buy the recipe for a million, put in about 2 million of salvage and crafting cost, and sell the result for 25 million inf or more. That's the best combination of "low starting cost, high profit" that I'm aware of; putting in 1 million and selling for 6, or 8 and selling for 20, are much easier to find.

Edit: You asked for guides and I got distracted.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=222969
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=210614

At 20 a lot of gold stuff opens up- mostly crap, but Miracle procs are in there.

Looks like 74 recipes, maybe 9 are very good including one of the big 3 [miracle.]

If you go 15-19 you have 45 recipes and maybe 6 are good, including zero of the big 3. I'd say level em to 17, get enough for 2 gold recipes, and roll random golds, but I have a known bias (see: Midlevel Crisis.)

24 rare salvage is like 36 million; if you get less than 36 million from your golds, I'll refund the difference.

EDIT: I don't know how much rare salvage actually costs. What do you get for 24,000 tickets, 48 rare salvage? Which would be 72 million ? I'll refund the difference from 72 million.

That is correct.

People were throwing around billions a year ago, too. At least they were on five or six PVP recipes. There are more things in the near-billion club now, but not a lot more.

A few effects:
1. There's just a year more of extra money in the system. 10% Wentworth fees don't keep up.

2. With Hero/Villain merits _most_ things have gotten cheaper. Anyone can get [say] a Kinetic Combat dam/rech by doing eleven missions over two days. So anyone over level 35 can make, like, sixty to a hundred million in two days. Prices went down correspondingly. The things you can't easily get with H/V merits, have gotten WAY more expensive because people have the same budget [or higher, see #3 and #4] and are spending less of it on things like Stealth IOs and Decimations, so they have more to spend on Armageddons.

3. With the Incarnate system people are playing their 50's more and their under-50s less. Any 50 can make 2 million an hour by sneezing. Any 50 that can get on an ITF (ie not playing like midafternoon on Pinnacle) can make 5 or 10 million an hour. Any level 40 can make, like, 10% of that. So even MORE inf in the system.

4. Better farming technology has lowered the price of rare salvage; this allows people more money in their budget for trendy purples.

Results: The very, very high end items have come down slightly: a Gladiator's Armor 3% has gone from 3-4 billion to 2-2.5 billion. The near-top items [like non-mez purples] have gone up considerably because you could spend almost the same number of Hero Merits and get a Glad Armor instead. So they're closing in on Glad Armor prices.

The high-end oranges have stayed the same in some cases [Miracle, LotG Recharge, Kin Combat] and dropped hard in others [Numina unique, Stealth]. The middle oranges [Decimation, Touch of Death] have dropped hard and everything else costs pocket change.

I may have overanswered the question.

EDITED: "pocket change" has gone up, mostly due to #2. When you can -anyone can- make 60 million in two days for an hour or two of work, buyers don't care if they pay 50K or 200K for salvage, or 200K or 1 million for a generic IO. I was going to write "nobody cares" but that's not quite true; the people who actually buy are the rich end of the game population by definition.

People did, in the very early stages of the invention system, find a way to dupe rares. But other than that, the biggest change in rarity FOR RECIPES I know of has been, like, doubling or tripling the amount you could get. (WSTs, hero merits,etc.)

On the other hand, people used to be impresed when farmers made 10 million an hour. With the AE and such, I believe it's gone up by a factor of ten or twenty. [That may not be new-inf-added-to-game, it may be inf-moved-into-your-pocket. I don't keep track of farming that closely.]

I'm pleased that there are new inf sinks* ; I'm distressed that the inf sinks have not remotely kept up with the advances in farming technology.

* I realized today that an Ultimate insp usually takes 1 to 3 million inf out of the game in Wentfees; they gave me what I asked for, a decent-sized consumable inf sink. Beats the heck out of jetpacks for 10K...

If I was going to put a note in Wents that said anything, it would say something like "Bids often fill if left up overnight." [Some people, like me, don't mind paying 300K for salvage. I know of at least one item that you can instabuy the recipe and ingredients for under 3 million, that sells for 30 million crafted. It's been doing this for a week. I'm running a convenience store.]

Hyper, I still think it would be more like the old school redside market: You couldn't reliably buy ANYTHING so people didn't sell anything valuable (in case they ever needed it again) and the market failed.

There are three PVP recipes I know of that are worth "The most money" out of, like, sixty. I don't know the details of AFK farming: last time I paid any attention it went like this: Get one character with a self rez power on auto, another character on another account with an attack on auto, put them in a corner of a PVP zone and go watch a movie while a boot steps on a human face forever.

I'm sure it's evolved some.

I have two arguments with that last post:

1. Every onmarket sale destroys 10% of the inf involved. This is functionally the way that 90%, if not 99%, of inf leaves this game.

Every offmarket sale destroys ZERO inf. There's a danger of causing real inflation with the supposed fix. And then more and more items get above cap and get sold offmarket... we've seen how the redside market failed. If you were in a big SG you might be able to get stuff; if not you were SOL.


2. "I'd hate it, but the best way of discouraging people from selling off market is to make the amount of influence you can trade (or email to anybody other than yourself) a lot smaller again so it takes ages to transfer large sums. " If your game has something in it people hate, most people will not do that thing. Some people will play the game without doing it; some people will find a less irritating game.

And some people will find a workaround: maybe the LoTG 7.5% will become the new currency, because it's worth about 200 million inf and you can trade eight of them at a time.

Dangit! Missed my window of opportunity!

That is, in fact, cheaper. Yes.

If you consider that the cost of level 50 SO's is about 5 million inf:
that's about 3 rare salvage
OR about 15 uncommon salvage
OR half a "decent drop", crafted.

Maybe I've been hanging out here too long, but I don't see the cost SO's, which is something like 15 million over your entire character's life, as a financial problem. Someone here had a standing offer, something like "Send me a tell and I'll email you 20 million, and you can afford to slot SO's 1-50."

Are you full of alignment missions and looking for the morality mission? I had that once, whacked about 200 guys... deleted a mission, got the morality in the next 10 or so.

I'd estimate that the total amount of inf in the game has gone up by a factor of 10 or more since the days of quick Katies. (And I remember nobody knew the worth of a steadfast 3%; I got one on my "6 million dollar man" build because I couldn't afford the knockback IO. )

Almost all of that goes to the high end stuff (thus, LoTGs going from 8 million to 160 million, while Ruin A/D/R is nearly unchanged.)

I'm not sure how I'd play by your challenge rules, Minotaur- marketing and vendoring up my first million or two is so second-nature to me, I don't know what I'd do without it.

This is me thinking out loud:
1) Strategically sell your large inspirations. Estimated 1 million inf out of the gate, and maybe 2 million more by level 20.
2) Grit your teeth through level 1-20. Sell any valued salvage or lucky drops. Do either Synapse or Sister Psyche; collect fifty R-merits (also, zone tours at 5 merits each if needed). Preorder your L25 IOs and get them all for around a million or two.
3) From level 25-35, sell salvage and any lucky drops (crafted) to get another 5+ million, estimated.
4) Here's where I get stuck: you need 20 million inf to turn those R-merits into an A-merit, which you can then turn into about 80 million inf with a 1-merit IO [there are at least three options that give more than 50 million at level 35 or less.]
5) Buy all sorts of cheapish frankenslot IO's with your 30-50 million inf profit.

A lot of people round everything up to the nearest half-million inf these days? I figure at half a million inf per IO it costs something like 32 million inf. That's not a lot of money these days if you sell ANYTHING at wentworth's.

All I know is that to me, she looks like she's lots of fun.

...oh, wait, we're talking about an actual person here? .