Grouchybeast

Now I'm confused.

If you don't play your 50s, why do you want to bother putting expensive IOs in them?

If you do play your 50s, then just play them in whatever content you're planning to play, and the expensive IOs will come with time. I can't think of much game content that doesn't provide a pretty decent return on play time at 50.

If only Incarnate status came with a free Field Crafter badge, eh?

;-)

See, if someone says 'grinding' to me, I think more about all that stuff I do to drag a character up to 50. Once they're there (or, at least, over ~45), I can stop thinking about how efficiently I'm making progress in terms of XP, and start playing them in whatever content takes my fancy at the time. It's really all just personal taste.

The most likely derivation is actually from the term from a college servant in certain colleges in England, which in turn probably comes from a type of tunic. But it's still best to avoid using it, as people do find it offensive, and there are perfectly good non-offensive words that mean the same thing.

The game has plenty of PVP opportunties: four PVP zones, arenas, Pocket D. These are largely ignored by the majority of players.

Co-op content, on the other hand, is pretty widely popular. Even before GR, the co-op TFs were amongst the most frequently run, and mixed teams were popular in the RWZ. GR acknowledges and builds on this by making cross-faction teaming possible for all content, and when I look at the makeup of teams these days, it's clearly being used by a lot of players.

Judging by past performance, attempts to 'enforce' PVP in the way you suggest will likely lead to content that is unpopular and underused. I'm not sure that's a good use of resources.

That's pretty much it. The only other pieces of information which fundamentally help to know are mechanical:

1. Listing costs you a non-refundable 5% of list price.
2. The market tax takes 10% of the final sale price, less the listing cost.
3. The highest bid buys the lowest priced item (provided the bid exceeds the listed price).

I'd phrase it slightly differently: is it appropriate that people who concentrate their time and attention on one part of a game should get better rewards from it than people who don't?

The thing is, it's perfectly possible to get a perfectly good return for your play time from the market by simply throwing every drop onto it for 1 inf. You won't make the best return by any means, but you'll get plenty, *precisely because* of the things you're seeing as flaws. I'd really like for any alternate system to be able to provide an equally acceptable for that kind of absolutely minimalist market use.

I'm not sure how many ways there are to get things quickly AND cheaply in a market. What would you suggest that would allow people to do that?

I play another game where listed prices are given, and you simply click on an item to buy it. The only way to get a bargain in that game is to sit on the market screen and refresh until someone lists low, and then hope you can click fast enough. I love that in CoH, I can put in a low bid and just walk away. Used properly, the CoH system is a great time saver when you look at it from the point of view of time spend using the market interface versus time spent in the rest of the game.

Sure, it doesn't let me get something very cheaply *now*, but I'm okay with that. I'm also okay with someone being able to pay a higher price than I'm willing to pay and get it now -- it's clearly worth more to them than it is to me, so they should have it. That seems like a pretty fair way to operate a market.

What does make me sad is when there's so little supply getting something becomes impossible at any price. I'd love to see some tweaks to improve the sub-50 market.


I'm all in favour of a long 'last sold' list, although I tend to agree with the people who say that increasing the amount of information will disproportionately benefit the people who know how to use it effectively.

I also note that one of the changes in the market UI recently was to *reduce* the amount of information given, as times were taken out of the 'last' sold window, leaving only dates. Now, I'm quite willing to believe that was done because it makes the window fit better or something, but it certainly doesn't point to a dev feeling that more info is better.

Honestly, I think you'd be doing a whole lot better here if you actually understood how the CoH market works. Because what you're describing there isn't possible within the game mechanics.

Also, you'd probably sell those IOs of yours faster.

I much prefer being able to place my bid for the price I want to pay, and then go do something more fun. If the alternative is sitting in WW, waiting for someone to list an item at a price I like, and hoping that my connection speed and WW lag will let me get it before someone else does, then no, thanks.

- Second accounts.

- Mutual arrangements with friends, to take turns with defeats, or to sign up your favourite 50 with a 50 they don't care about, and vice versa.

The 'random' sign-up system as described is very gameable. Of course, those specific holes could be plugged. However, as AE demonstrates, when there are large number of players looking for exploits, and a small number of devs plugging them, the players are going to win, and keep on winning.

Yes -- be incredibly patient and persistent.

This person who posted in the EU forum had the same problem as you, but after a lot of to-and-fro with customers support they finally got it sorted and bought their EU account:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=233942

Good luck, and hope to see you on the EU servers soon. :-)

I was actually trying not to buy anything, though. I kind of wished there was a button for 'I didn't mean it, have it back'.

Absolutely. The 'worst' that happens is that your IOs are snapped up by a flipper, and resold for more. And even in that case, there's the small side benefit of two lots of market fees taking inf out of circulation. From an inflation pov, the more trips an IO makes through the market, the better.

Or, occasionaly, someone will get a real bargain. I've accidentally bought the odd IO at 1 inf when placing bids for non-buying purposes, and always felt slightly surprised and a little guilty.

But, really, so long as you're happy with the inf you're getting, all is good.

If you do a lot of flipping, then you get a good feel for price ranges quite quickly. At the very least, when your low-ball bid stacks stop filling, it's time to raise the price. (Which is why active flipping in a niche tends to close the gap between high and low prices.)

It depends on the state of the market. When salvage supply is lagging behind demand (say, there's a major AE exploit killing white and yellow salvage supplies), it's entirely possible to have a stack of salvage selling and right next to it a stack of bids filling. When the buy stack fills, flip it over and start a new one. It's a while since I've done it, and I've never seen it quite as extreme as it was when AE first came out, but it's kind of fun, in a hypnotic way. Good for WW sales badges, too.

You have to remember, for a lot of people, it isn't worth their time to wait a minute to see if a low bid will fill. Or even ten seconds. Or even to put in a low bid at all.

I get confused when I have to click too many buttons too fast, and I find rad/rad relaxing and easy to play, so it might not be what you're looking for.

Kins always seem to be bouncing around all over the place firing off powers and buffing people.

I wonder what would happen if there was a 'find the recipe and salvage to craft this IO' link on IOs, in the same way as there's a 'find salvage' link on recipes?