Grouchybeast

That's how the cookie of science crumbles. Still, negative results aren't the same as failures -- supporting or disproving your hypothesis are both interesting and useful outcomes.

Also, you should definitely keep the screenshots. Then when someone shows up in a few months time to decry the evil market manipulators who are manipulating salvage prices to make piles of inf, you can point them to the thread with actual evidence. Much better than just having a bunch of forum regulars go 'yeah, that probably isn't going to work out too well for you'.

See, this is what happens when you say things like 'the next roll is bound to be higher, so no problem'. You have angered the RNG gods!

After three bad rolls, you're still making a fairly decent return, though. Even without buying A-merits, it's looking like around a billion is a perfectly plausible return for one character running tips for a month.

That reminds me of a colleague at work telling us how an Irish friend got himself in trouble at an airport in the US. When he was asked by the Immigration officer why he was visiting America, he said, "For the crack."

And even though it's an experiment that's been done before, there can still be value in repeating it. I used to work in science, and sometimes it paid to check even work that's been peer reviewed, published, and cited in multiple places. Sometimes -- even if rarely -- it *is* wrong. Probably not in this case, but I still think it's admirable for the OP to put the work in to try to produce their own evidence, rather than taking the more popular route of unilaterally declaring victory and taking their bat home.

Awesome! Good luck with the experiment, and I'm looking forwards to the results.

It would be cool if as well as screenshots you could make a note of how much time it takes you to manage the niche: to log in, flip the stacks over, vendor excess salvage etc.

Cba, tbh.

If your lowball bid is higher than 275/1100/5500, then it's still more profitable to throw the salvage on the market and take your inf than go to a vendor. Especially if you've got enough lowball bids up that you're soaking up all the supply -- the sellers get a guaranteed instant sale at higher than vendor price. Win!

If your lowball bid is less than vendor price, then there is nothing to stop people putting the item on for 275/1100/5500 (or even 1 inf above your lowball price) and leaving it to sell. After all, you're now providing a great service for those sellers -- you are sucking that lower-priced supply out of the market at your expense, and leaving them with the lowest item listed for the next bidder to come along. And, generally, items sell for more than the listing price.

Remember that when the seller comes to the market, they will see your hundreds or thousands of lowball bids listed. You've created the impression of demand. You're *encouraging* people to list, and with your lowball bid you've created a price floor -- a floor that you're going to have to keep raising if you want to keep control.

Your lowball bids will have to rise as people start pricing just above. Your high listings will have to fall as people start pricing just below. With, as someone points out above, an awful lot of work and very little profit, you've made that item *better* for people who want to sell it on the market.

You know when most people vendor/delete salvage? When they get to the market and there are 10,000 Temporal Analyzers listed for sale and no bids. And, really, at that point does deleting a stack of 10 make any difference to anyone?

I'm not sure if you're actually serious here, but, okay.

A level 45+ has 50 basic salvage slots. Assuming that your lowball bids were all for 1 inf and ignoring the purchase cost, then you can make either 12,500, 50,000 or 250,000 per trip, depending on whether you were picking up commons, uncommons or rares (and I can't think of many rares that are going to fill fast at 1 inf lowball bids).

Short of spending all their time dancing under the Atlas statue, I can't think of many less profitable ways for a level 50 character to make inf.

Okay, let's think about what would happen actually there.

First of all, let's say you have 30 level 50 toons you can devote entirely to the project. That gives you 480 slots you can fill with stacks of 10 bids. 4800 lowball bids.

People who come to the market will see your lowball buy price in the history. If you're offering a price they like, they'll list below it and you'll buy their Temporal Sands and you're both happy. If they don't like it, they'll list above it and your bids will not remove that supply from the market. Of course, you can put in higher bids to suck out that supply, but remember that those bids will then fill first, including the next 1 inf listing that someone throws on the market.

Anyway, let's assume that you fill your lowball bids and empty the low end of the price range.

Now on to part two. You delete most of your purchases, and list the rest high. Don't forget that if you're actually trying to make money, you need to factor in the buy price. E.g. If you keep 10% of the supply, then you need to sell it for eleven times more than you paid for it just to break even.

But that's okay, because you have the only supply. Except that, of course, any existing supply on the market your lowball bids didn't pick up will sell before your high listing, if their listing price is in the gap between your lowball bids and high listing. Don't forget the constant trickle of new supply coming onto the market from other players, either -- every single one of those has the potential to sell first if it's priced even 1 inf lower than your high listing.

So, you'd better put more lowball bids out there to catch that supply. I'd guess that, since you're completely removing supply by deleting it, that your lowballs are going to have to be a little bit higher this time, which means you'll have to delete fewer or list even higher to make a profit.

And, of course, anyone who sees your lowball bid figure in the last 5 sales can choose to bid 1 inf more and wait, and they'll get the next TS listed for less than that figure, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Meanwhile, every single Temporal Sands than goes onto the market at a listing price between your lowball bids and high listings is taking a sale away from you. Every time you have to take a break and your lowball bids run out, even more get by you. Your high listings will sit there, waiting for there to be not one single TS listed at a lower price, and for someone to buy it nao, instead of bidding a little above your lowball and waiting five minutes.

Does that seem like a reasonable description of how the market functions to you?

I read your whole post with a vague sense of confusion, which I finally nailed down to this concept here.

I *think* that you're talking about 'the end game' and 'progress through the incarnate system' as though they're two different things. Is there some dev source for this that I haven't seen? Is there any indication that there is an end game system envisaged *beyond* progress through the incarnate levels? I'd kind of assumed -- and never noticed any statements to contradict -- that the end game we were getting *was* the incarnate trials that give progress through the incarnate levels. Is is actually the case that the trials are just a gateway, and there's going to be another chunk of content beyond that?

Actually, given the system they're using, you're far more likely to end up as @Cobra Ma. Unless there's already a motherly hooded snake out there, in which case you'll be Cobra M.

My favourite support to play is probably rad/rad. It's mostly toggles and long-recharge clicks so I can keep on top of it, and the heal isn't all that great so people don't usually expect you to save their lives with it, it's just a bonus if you can.

My favourite support to play alongside is pretty much any kind of tank. Of all the ways to minimise my incoming damage and maximise my outgoing, there's nothing quite like having the bad guys ineffectually punching someone who's punching them right back.

Actually, I think it's a pretty cool experiment. It's fairly often said in this forum that it's possible for people who dislike the market minigame to make plenty of inf by simply putting all their drops on the market for 1 inf, and it's always good to see a theory tested. I think that making A-Merit random rolls and listing the results for 1 is a fair test of max return for minimal market interaction, given a decent sample size; getting the A-merits is a fixed amount of effort.

The last Apex I ran had my fire blaster, a controller of some kind, and six scrappers and brutes. The TF went fine, and everything, including BM, died, so unless I'm considerably more awesome than I thought I was, all that melee must've been doing *something*.

Nip always makes me think of the UK English phrase 'nip out for a ***' (go outside quickly to smoke a cigarette), which is famous for bewildering Americans when they hear it for the first time.

With a game with a global player base, the profanity filter can get confusing.


ETA: removed by the filter, of course, but I'm sure everyone knows what I mean, and if you don't, Google is your friend.

I definitely prefer the BM fight to the warwalker fight. Not that the warwalkers are awful, it's just that BM is a little different, with all the zipping around to avoid the patches and the swords. It makes a nice change of pace.

I think it's cool that the GMs are providing some more variety in the TFs. No doubt there will be some of the new TFs that I won't enjoy as much as others, but as I can pick and choose the content I run, I can play the ones I enjoy more the most, while people who like different things will hopefully get to enjoy those things in other TFs.

How do you feel about Tin Mage II? Is that also taking TFs in the wrong direction? I don't think it's fair to talk about the direction the game is taking without considering the entirety of the new content -- there's a difference between changing the whole tone of the game, and offering players a greater variety in TFs.

That's how the whole game works, really, though. You gets levels and powers, that make the next levels and powers easier to reach. The better the IO sets you slot, the faster you can kill mobs to get even better IOs.

That sounds like it's going to be great. And I you get people creeped out now, just wait until she's all green and rotting, with bones poking out :-)

She sounds cool. Any chance of a screenshot?

I have a female zombie MM who shows a fair amount of skin (what's left of it, anyway), and judging by tells I've had, she's creeped some people out, too. No one has ever threatened to report her, though.

Hmm. As a writer, I would have to say that given a choice between rewards, or having random strangers tell me what they like and dislike about my writing, I would go for the rewards every time.